Silas and Christina King moved to Chicago in 1892 soon after the birth of Roxanna, and within a short time after, they divorced.

Early in 1897 Silas Harris Pomeroy begins business in Chicago with Mr. Frank Voightmann of Chicago, Ill., in the manufacture and sale of a fire window, made of galvanized iron with wired glass, the latter material having been put upon the market as a new article of commerce by the Mississippi Glass Company, of St. Louis, Mo.

On March 6, 1905 Silas remarried to Georgia Mellus Starr, born Feruary 22, 1866 New York City. She was the daughter of James Hyatt Starr, born October 14, 1817 and died December 6, 1896. Her mother was Emma Mellus, born January 28, 1845 and she died April 1, 1887. Silas and his second wife built a handsome and distinctive residence at New Rochelle, New York, and they moved into it the following September, 1906.

In April of 1926, Silas and his sister Mary presented the Knights of Columbus with a Flag Pole, Genesee Street. (Utica, New York)

“Landscaper David Ross, of Ross Landscape Construction, installed the additional garden. The centerpiece of the new garden is a historic flag pole donated by the county that once adorned the former Knights of Columbus building on Genesee Street. The building, home to Theodore Pomeroy, former Auburn mayor and speaker of the House of Representatives, was demolished in 1999.

Pomeroy’s children presented the Knights of Columbus the flag pole in April 1926.”

Later that year, on 26 October, The New York Times details that his wife Georgia is trying to have him declared incompetent. (I guess she wants his money!!)

“SAYS S.H. POMEROY IS NOT COMPETENT; Wife of Manufacturer Applies to Court for Sheriff’s Jury -Decision Reserved. INCOHERENT, SHE ASSERTS Under Nurse’s Care Nine Years — Defendant, in Florida, Has Counsel Oppose Action.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., Oct. 25. — Setting forth five allegations that her husband, Silas Harris Pomeroy, a seventy-year-old steel window manufacturer, living at 154 Neptune Avenue, New Rochelle, is unable to manage himself and his affairs, Mrs. Georgia Starr Pomeroy applied today to Supreme Court Justice Arthur S. Tompkins for the appointment of three Commissioners to preside over a Sheriff’s jury to pass upon his competency.”

Christina King, born February 21, 1860 in Chicago – mother of Roxana Pomeroy, and former wife of Silas Harris Pomeroy, was the daughter of Henry William King, (Henry W. King) and Aurelia Roxana Case. My great-great-great grandfather and grandmother.

Henry was born in Martinsburg, Lewis county, New York, December 18, 1828. He died 13 April 1898 in Chicago, IL.

His parents William and Christina (Rockwell) King, were both natives of New York and represented old New England families. Henry was the oldest of the three boys. His two brothers were Charles Bohan King, and Philo Rockwell King. (they will be covered next). His parents sent him to the public schools of his native town, where he pursued his studies until at the age of thirteen he matriculated in the State Academy at Lowville, New York, entering there upon a preparatory course, fitting him for college. He left the academy at the age of seventeen and became assistant in his father’s store. He took up the work, as he supposed, only temporarily, for at the outset he did not abandon his plan of pursuing a college course. The business insight in him, however, was soon well developed and he found such pleasure and success in commercial life that he continued therein. He became one of the most practical men of affairs and in the school of experience learned lessons that placed him far ahead of many men of university training. His initial experience was under his father’s direction and later in Utica, New York. His father William ran a hardware outfit in Martinsburg.In 1854, his father sent him west, and he came to Chicago. Chicago then contained only a few thousand population and though its business activities were comparatively small, Mr. King recognized that it was destined to become a great commercial center.

Henry was well known in financial circles, and for more than 25 years had been a director of the Commercial National Bank of Chicago. He was also a trustee of the United States Mortgage Company of New York, and one of the American trustees of the Liverpool, London & Globe Fire Insurance Company.

Info taken from: Chicago: Its History and Its Builders, a Century of Marvelous Growth, Volume 4 By Josiah Seymour Currey

Source: A History of Lewis County, in the State of New York: From the Beginning of … By Franklin Benjamin Hough, P 172 Martinsburgh

In 1854, when Henry arrived in Chicago, He was first associated with S. L. Barrett and P. V. Kellogg, under the firm name of Barrett, King & Co., and opened a wholesale clothing house at 189 South Water street.

In 1857 the business was removed to Nos. 205-207 South Water street, and three years later to Nos, 25-27 Lake street.

This clothing company grossed about $150,000 in sales in its first year.

Source:
Internet pdf file: Prominent Men of the Great West

4 years after Henry arrived in Chicago, he met and married Aurelia Roxana Case.

Aurelia was born 6 February 1834 in Nassau, NY; died 31 December 1900 in Chicago Illinois. She married Henry King on 22 June 1858 in Chicago.

“Mr, King was married in 1858 to Miss Aurelia Case, a daughter of Mr. John R. Case, one of Chicago’s early citizens, now deceased. They have one son and two daughters, viz., Francis, now associated with his father in business ; Elizabeth, the wife of Mr. Cyrus Bentley, an attorney at law, of Chicago, and Christine, the wife of Mr. S. H, Pomeroy, of Pittsfield, Mass.”

They also had another son, Henry King Jr., but he was murdered.

Aurelia died of pneumonia at her home of 151 Rush Street, Chicago Illinois, on Monday 31 December 1900.

Henry’s success was originally set-off by an exclusive contract with the United States Union Army to manufacture their uniforms for the Civil War (1861-65). That’s how Henry first became rich.

During 1863, Henry W. King changes his firm name to King, Kellog & Co. due to the withdrawal of Mr. Barrett. This is the same year that he first became a director (for the next 25 years) in Commerce National Bank. Albert Keep was also a director, and Franklin Mcveagh (Yale Skull & Bones 1862) was it’s President. Albert Keep later replaced Henry on the board of the McCormick Theological Seminary in 1898, when Henry died.

Henry W. King associated himself with Messrs. W. C. Browning and Edward W. Dewey, of New York, under the style of Henry W.King & Co., opening a store at the corner of Lake street and Michigan avenue. Since 1868 the name and personnel of the firm have remained unchanged, the firm name of Browning, King & Co., and their annual business, with that of the wholesale house, aggregates about $5,000,000…

John Hazard Browning’s sons were not sorry when the Civil War came. They wangled a huge contract for soldiers’ uniforms out of the Federal Government. After Appomattox they might have gone bankrupt had not a man named Henry W. King joined the firm. War had ruined their southern business, so Henry W. King opened a store in Chicago. It made so much money that the Brownings were glad to add his name to their corporate title, open other stores in the West. Browning, King had a chain of haberdasheries while the late James Butler, founder of the first grocery chain, was still a farm hand in Kilkenny.

One of the things the firm made was golf clubs, and there was even a “King” line of golfballs!

The firm eventually had two stores in New York (besides Chicago), stores in Brooklyn, St. Louis, Boston, Providence, Buffalo, Chicago, Kansas City, Milwaukee, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Omaha, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Browning, King & Co. toppled into bankruptcy in 1934, and there were no Kings left in the firm by then.

Henry was counted among Chicago millionaires, and was listed on the Tribune list of American Millionaires in 1892.

Section: City of Chicago:

Henry’s brother Charles B. King, had helped Henry transform the company into a wholesale and retail clothing empire.

Henry and both his brothers, Philo R. King and Charles B. King, founded in Chicago King Brothers and company in 1869.

Interesting fact: The famous Skull and Bones Society gets going at Yale around this time, in 1870. Yale is where Henry’s brother Charles will send his boys, as well as Philo’s kids went to Yale too.

Cyrus Bentley II ( who married Henrys’ daughter Elizabeth) also went to Yale, and was a member of something called the Scroll and Key Society.

The Scroll and Key Society is a senior or secret society, founded in 1841 at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut. It is the second oldest Yale secret society.

Scroll and Key was established by John Porter, with aid from several members of the Class of 1842 and a member of the Class of 1843, Wiliam Kingsley, after disputes over elections to Skull and Bones Society, the oldest society at Yale. Porter, William Kingsley, Enos Taft, Samuel Perkins, Homer Sprague, Lebbeus Chapin, George Jackson, Calvin Child, Charlton Lewis, and Josiah Harmer were among the society’s first members.Theodore Runyon, Issac Heister and Leonard Case were also early members from the Class of 1842. William Kingsley, the namesake of the alumni organization, was a member of the Class of 1843. Initially, members met in ornately decorated rented rooms that burned down in December 1842, forcing them to relocate.

The society is one of the reputed “Big Three societies” at Yale, along with Skull and Bones and Wolf’s Head Society. – Wikipedia

In 1853 Cyrus Bentley I marries Anna H. Riley – parents of Cyrus Bentley the 2nd (born in Chicago 1861) who marries Mary Elizabeth King in 1888.

Cyrus and Elizabeth’s daughter Margaret Bentley was presented to Society along with Roxana Pomeroy in November 1912.

Per the Chicago Tribune Archives, October 9, 1912:

“Mrs. Bryan Lathrop will give a inner-dance at her residence, 120 Bellevue place on the evening before Thanksgiving, in compliment to Miss Roxane Pomroy and Miss Margaret Bentley, both of whom are to be presented to Society.”

“Both young women were graduated from the Nixon school in Florence, Italy last summer.”

Cyrus, as attorney to his long-time good friend Cyrus McCormick Jr. (who had succeeded his father as the head of McCormick Harvesting Machine Co., worked with J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller in 1902 to maneuver all competing elements through mergers and other methods, into being underneath a new conglomerate formed called The International Harvester Company. A signature move of J.P. Morgans that “eliminates competition”.

See book Scientology Roots – Chapter 16 for more information on Morgan and Rockefeller’s methods and activities.

McCormick became the new conglomerate’s President, and Cyrus Bentley II became its general counsel.

Cyrus was also involved with the “National Citizens’ League for the Creation of a Sound Banking System”, which was a deception on the American public to try and float the Morgan/Warburg/Schiff Federal Reserve Act past them. After the panic of 1907 (engineered), the American Public pretty much hated the Wall Street Bankers, and movement was occuring along the lines of what happened when President Jackson was President. Action was taken to derail this, by the Bankers.

“The final phase of the drive for a central bank began in January 1911. At the previous January’s meeting of the National Board of Trade, Paul Warburg had put through a resolution setting aside January 18, 1911, as a “monetary day” devoted to a “Business Men’s Monetary Conference.” This conference, run by the National Board of Trade, and featuring delegates from metropolitan mercantile organizations from all over the country, had C. Stuart Patterson as its chairman. The New York Chamber of Commerce, the Merchants’ Association of New York, and the New York Produce Exchange, each of which had been pushing for banking reform for the past five years, introduced a joint resolution to the monetary conference supporting the Aldrich Plan, and proposing the establishment of a new “businessmen’s monetary reform league” to lead the public struggle for a central bank. After a speech in favor of the plan by A. Piatt Andrew, the entire conference adopted the resolution. In response, C. Stuart Patterson appointed none other than Paul M. Warburg to head a committee of seven to establish the reform league. The committee of seven shrewdly decided, following the lead of the old Indianapolis convention, to establish the National Citizens’ League for the Creation of a Sound Banking System at Chicago rather than in New York, where the control really resided. The idea was to acquire the bogus patina of a “grassroots” heartland operation and to convince the public that the league was free of dreaded Wall Street control. As a result, the official heads of the League were Chicago businessmen John V. Farwell and Harry A. Wheeler, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The director was University of Chicago monetary economist J. Laurence Laughlin, assisted by his former student, Professor H. Parker Willis.

In keeping with its midwestern aura, most of the directors of the Citizens’ League were Chicago non-banker industrialists: men such as B.E. Sunny of the Chicago Telephone Company, Cyrus McCormick of International Harvester (both companies in the Morgan ambit), John G. Shedd of Marshall Field and Company,[Note: see Charles Yoe FreemanFamily Tree II] Frederic A. Delano of the Wabash Railroad Company (Rockefeller-controlled), and Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck. Over a decade later, however, H. Parker Willis frankly conceded that the Citizens’ League had been a propaganda organ of the nation’s bankers.“

Section The Origins of The Federal Reserve, from book:A history of money and banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II, by Murray Newton Rothbard, Murray Newton Rothbard – 2002

Continuing with Henry:

The Chicago Fire of October 9, 1871 hits, (see Family Tree II), and Henry was president of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society from 1871 to 1873. This society disbursed the enormous sum of $5,000,000 during that time, mostly contributed for the relief of those who suffered in the great fire.

William Henry Bush was made a partner in the new firm of the Kings in 1872, just three years after beginning his work for them.

Bush may have bought out the King firm in 1885 (with his father-in-law Gliddens’ help), but in any case, Bush, with his brother-in-law Francis T. Simmons (husband of his sister Harriet), established Bush, Simmons and Company, a wholesale hat and glove dealership. The two men, with Bush serving as president and reasurer, located the firm at 241 Monroe Street in the heart of the Chicago business district; soon afterward their company, having acquired many of King Brothers’ former clients, was prospering. They dealt in hats, caps, and ladies’ kid gloves sold at stores throughout Chicago-which by 1890 had more than a million inhabitants and ranked second second only to New York City in population.

William Henry Bush was a member of the Chicago Club in 1885, illustratively his relative wealth in 1894 was on a rung down from Philip Armour. (see Gurnee line My Family Tree II)

Philo R. King, had a vacation home in Delavan lake in Wisconsin, Bush visited him in August 1894.

In 1886 Browning, King Co. was boycotted by The Clothing Cutters’ Assembly of Chicago:

CHICAGO, Dec. 10.–The Clothing Cutters’ Assembly of Chicago to-day received a circular letter from the assembly in New-York announcing that a boycott had been placed upon the goods of Browning, King Co., clothing manufacturers of New-York and Chicago. It is understood that the boycott here goes into effect without further notice. The firm is involved in a dispute with its employes over a question of work.

Source:BOYCOTTING A NEW-YORK FIRM, December 11, 1886, Wednesday

In 1888, Henry’s son Henry W. King Jr. is murdered. Apparently he was married 3 times. One source says it’s his ex-wife that did it, another says it was his mistress. He was shot at 4 times by the woman, and finally died. Henry had made an “unfortunate marriage” which caused his relatives trouble, and so a divorce had been arranged earlier. That first wife was Carrie Walker. It is the “second” wife that shot him, Annie Duffy.

1.

A DESERTED WIFE’S CRIME; TAKING REVENGE WITH A REVOLVER. HENRY W. KING, JR., OF CHICAGO FOLLOWED TO THE WEST AND FOUND WITH HIS THIRD BRIDE.

November 18, 1888, Wednesday

OMAHA, Neb., Nov. 17.–Henry W. King, Jr., was murdered in this city at 8 o’clock this morning. A few weeks ago Browning, King Co., clothiers of Chicago, opened a branch here. Henry W. King, son of one of the proprietors…

A most intriguing event associated with the original Paxton was the murder of Harry King, son of the millionaire owner of Browning, King & Co. men’s apparel store in Omaha. King’s mistress, Elizabeth Bechler, fired two shots at him as he walked away from her in the hotel lobby.

In 1888, Henry began being President of the board of trustees of the McCormick Theological Seminary. He continued in this position until his death in 1898.

Source:
Internet pdf file: Prominent Men of the West

In Elmhurst, Illinois, In 1868, Seth Wadhams founder of the Knickerbocker Ice Company in Chicago purchased a treeless farm called the “Burnhams Lot” and built a home, calling it “White Birch.” He surrounded his new home with as many species of trees that were able to survive in this climate, He also hired a landscaper, gardener and herdsman to care for the property.

Later on the estate became known as “Wilder Park”.

After the Kings enlarged the home, adding a wing on the north side as well as a veranda on the east and north sides. It looked like this:

In addition to the home, Wadhams built a greenhouse for his wife to help her to overcome her grief over the death of her son. This greenhouse, still in use today, is located to the rear of the Conservatory and is the forerunner of the extensive horticultural activities which are currently taking place in Wilder Park.

Following the death of Seth Wadhams in 1888, Mrs. Henry (Aurelia Case) King, daughter of Seth’s lifelong friend, John R. Case, inherited the home. After the Kings moved into the White Birch Estate, King employed a landscape architect to landscape the area surrounding the home.

Aurelia Case King continued the tradition of her predecessor, becoming interested in gardening and establishing a library on the subject.

She created an herb garden, based upon the descriptions of Erasmus, a Dutch humanist; and a flower garden, modeled after the one at Mount Vernon, Virginia.

In 1893 on 10 February, the Ludowici Roof Tile company is formed by Henry W. King, Cyrus McCormick and Carl Ludowici. TheLudowici Roof Tile Company was formed as an lllinois Corporation. The three shareholders were Henry W King,Cyrus I. McCormick, and Carl Ludowici. King and McCormick each purchased 125shares while Ludowici held 150 shares. The first plant was at Chicago Heights, Illinois. It is thought it was an existing plant called United States Tile Roofing Company. The Company took advantage of the Great Chicago Exposition providing tile for its construction. The Chicago Heights plant was constantly expanded until it ranked amongst the largest plants producing clay roof tile in the United States.

In 1894 approximately, Henry W. King was sued, and his attorney was also the attorney for a Railroad that Walter S. Gurnee had been President of.

Mr. Eastman is general counsel for the Wisconsin & Michigan Railway company, local attorney of the Chicago & Northwestern Railway company, and is also the attorney of Geo. Scotfield and the Scotfield & Arnold Lumber company, and the firm is counsel for the Marinette Gas, Electric Light & Street Railway company, and is retained annually by a large number of the lumber and manufacturing companies on the Menomimnee river.

…He was attorney for Henry W. King & Co. vs Ferd. Armstrong, known as the famous Bishop vs. McGillis litigation, which was first tried in Chicago and went through the Illinois supreme court, resulting in a decision in favor of his client. Subsequently, the litigation was renewed in Wisconsin, and went through the Wisconsin supreme court twice, ultimately resulting in favor of his client. In this litigation, many thousands of dollars were involved and many fine questions of law. When this case was tried in Chicago, the celebrated Capt. W. P. Black, of anarchist fame, was one of the opposing attorneys.
Source: EVERETT CLARK EASTMAN

In 1895, Henry W. King is President of the Chicago Commercial Club.

Henry was also a member of the Chicago Club, and the Jekyll Island Club, where the famous secret Federal Reserve planning meeting took place in the early 1900’s.

Some background on these clubs:

In January 1869, a meeting was called in the club-room of the Sherman House, which was then Chicago’s leading hotel, kept by Gage Brothers & Rice. About 40 gentlemen attended the meeting, but nothing much was decided.

At the next meeting, David Gage was chairman and John James secretary, a resolution was passed: “Resolved, that a committee be appointed and authorized to select without ballot one hundred citizens of Chicago who shall become members of a Club to be known as the Chicago Club, on payment of an initiation fee of one hundred dollars. This committee is then authorized to secure and furnish suitable quarters for the club, and call a meeting of its members for the purpose of further organization, such as the adoption of a charter, election of officers, etc.”

Papers for incorporation were drawn up, and E.W. Russell crowded them through the House of Representatives and then they passed the Senate.

The committee then rented and furnished the old Farnam mansion, a double, red-brick house, which stood before the fire on Michigam Avenue between Adams and Jackson Streets. The Farnams were one of Chicago’s leading families before the Civil War, but in the early sixties (1860’s) went back East, along with the Ogdens, Gurnees and others eventually.

The first meeting with all 101 members was called May 1, 1869.

Ezra B. McCagg – first President Chicago Club 1869-1872

They decided to elect Ezra McCagg as their first President, but surprised him with it – he had no idea that was the plan. McCagg had married the sister of William B. Ogden, Chicago’s first mayor and wealthiest citizen, and his house, in which he had collected one of the finest libraries of rare books in the country, was one of the social centers of the city.

After the great fire of 1871 destroyed it’s quarters, the Chicago Club came on hard times. By 1875, over 100 of it’s most prominent members had either resigned or were dropped for non-payment of dues.

On April 3, 1875, several members basically took over and changed the management of the club, one of these was Franklin MacVeagh. New quarters were procured.

During the sixteen years the club remained on Monroe Street it developed almost exclusively into a lunch club.

Members who lunched at the club regularly grew into the habit of sitting with the same men ever day and in this way a number of regular messes were formed. The most notable of these was the round table, or “millionaire’s table”, as it was sometimes called. However, funnily enough, the men who started it, at the time were anything but millionaires yet but soon would be. Marshall Field was a millionaire and was a quite frequent visitor of “the round table”.

Quote from book source listed below:

Henry W. King and T. B. Blackstone seldom missed a noonday meal at the round table. Mr. King was a great reader and thinker for a business man, a man of many interests, uncompromising in his denunciation of all that was wrong in the community and a power for the right. He was president of the Relief and Aid Society, which distributed several millions in chairty after the great fire; a pillar of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, [note: where John Newton Freeman later worked] and on account of his strong personality and the active interest he took in his neighborhood was sometimes called “the Mayor of Rush Street.”

By May 29, 1890, the membership had reached it’s limits again at 450, and needed new quarters. In 1891, it then bought the Art Institute building, which is the picture at the beginning of this little history. It was ready for occupation in 1893.

The Members list in the book shows the following of my relatives:

Charles Garfield King, 1897

Francis King, 1893

Rockwell King, 1896

Charles C. Yoe, 1889

And Henry is listed in the in memoriam section, but was obviously a member prior to 1893.

Source: A history of the Chicago Club, By Edward Tyler Blair, 1898

An interesting anecdote:

J.B. Sullivan & Brother, who opened their establishment in 1855 at 266 and 268 North Clark Street, were world famous decorators. They decorated the Chicago Club and Henry’s personal house, as well as the New Orleans Cotton Exchange. They were considered to be as Tiffany is to New York, the Sullivans were to Chicago.

Source: Chicago’s first half century, published 1883

The Chicago Commercial club was founded on December 27, 1877, and Henry W. King, an original member, was president of it in 1895. A New York Times article from 1884 describes it a bit here, and mentions Henry W. King. In 1897, John V. Farwell, Jr. championed a 16-year Commercial Club campaign to reform the Federal Reserve system and helped draft the Federal Reserve Banking Act of 1913.
Source: Chicago Commercial Club website.

In a book entitled Banking Reform, (originally published by the league, but reprinted in 1980) there is a list of members for each state tasked to help with the National Citizens’ League for the Creation of a Sound Banking System, and there is an odd entry that stood out to me.

It was this:

German division???

But also in this book, is this:

So there is Farwell, heading up this league!

Reprise from section discussing Cyrus Bentley and Cyrus McCormick:

Patterson appointed none other than Paul M. Warburg to head a committee of seven to establish the reform league. The committee of seven shrewdly decided, following the lead of the old Indianapolis convention, to establish the National Citizens’ League for the Creation of a Sound Banking System at Chicago rather than in New York, where the control really resided. The idea was to acquire the bogus patina of a “grassroots” heartland operation and to convince the public that the league was free of dreaded Wall Street control. As a result, the official heads of the League were Chicago businessmen John V. Farwell and Harry A. Wheeler, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The director was University of Chicago monetary economist J. Laurence Laughlin, assisted by his former student, Professor H. Parker Willis.

In keeping with its midwestern aura, most of the directors of the Citizens’ League were Chicago non-banker industrialists: men such as B.E. Sunny of the Chicago Telephone Company, Cyrus McCormick of International Harvester (both companies in the Morgan ambit), John G. Shedd of Marshall Field and Company,[Note: see Charles Yoe FreemanFamily Tree II] Frederic A. Delano of the Wabash Railroad Company (Rockefeller-controlled), and Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck. Over a decade later, however, H. Parker Willis frankly conceded that the Citizens’ League had been a propaganda organ of the nation’s bankers.“

Section The Origins of The Federal Reserve, from book:A history of money and banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II, by Murray Newton Rothbard, Murray Newton Rothbard – 2002

The Jekyll Island Club

“It all started with a little-known,but extraordinary man named Newton Finney,who served briefly on Robert E. Lee’s staff as captain of engineers during the Civil War. Newton Finney and his brother-in-law, John Eugene DuBignon, were the early developers whose plan for a hunting club for wealthy northerners hatched into the most exclusive social club in the United States. Between 1879 and 1885, the two men worked on acquiring ownership of this Georgia historic landmark and convincing investors of the merits of the idea. Finney lived in New York and, having connections to members of such institutions as the Union Club, the so-called “mother of clubs,” he carefully built the membership and early foundations for the Club. After Dubignon, the lone original member from the south, purchased the island, he in turn sold it to the newly incorporated Jekyll Island Club and its original 53 members/investors, among whom were Marshall Field, Henry Hyde, J.P. Morgan, Joseph Pulitzer and William K. Vanderbilt.

Ground was broken for the Clubhouse in mid-August 1886, and the club officially opened its doors in January 1888.”Source: Jekyllclub.com

Finney was delighted with the response not only in numbers but also in the quality of the people who were showing enthusiasm for his club. These were not just rich and successful businessmen. They were at the very top of the social ladder-prominent men at the height of their careers. He could not help being elated to find himself in their company, for their very names on his list guaranteed the club’s success. A profile of these members reveals that almost all were native-born Americans with ancestral origins in the British Isles; derived from old colonial families; were Episcopalians or Presbyterians (recognized as the “elite” religions of the nineteenth century); preferred the Republican Party; and had been born to wealth.

Before the April deadline, Finney had obtained not just fifty subscriptions for club membership, but fifty-three, as several members had agreed to split their two shares with a friend. Finney, for example, gave up his two shares to the newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer… Thirty-nine-year-old Pulitzer was something of an anomaly among the original members. He had been born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother in Budapest, spoke little English when he first came to the United States in 1864, and was an ardent Democrat…Source: The Jekyll Island Club: Southern haven for America’s millionaires, By William Barton McCash, June Hall McCash

John Jacob Astor the IV,was another original Jekyll Island club member.

“Out of the original Jekyll Island club members,the second largest number (besides New York) came from Chicago.

This group of six Chicagoans had been at the forefront of relief and recovery efforts after the great fire of 1871, [Note: which definitely includes Henry W. King] and also belonged to the prestigious Chicago Club, and were key figures on the Chicago Board of Trade. They represented the most “elite” society in their city. They would form a circle that significantly affected the development of the Jekyll Island Club.”

Some of the names were Marshall Field, his lawyer and friend Wirt Dexter, and Ezra McCagg who was also a lawyer and had served as the first president of the Chicago Club.

Marshall was one of the six original club members from Chicago. He belonged from 1886 until his death in 1906. Charles Yoe Freeman was mixed up with Marshall Field and Co. as was James Russell Forgan – see My Family Tree II.

On page 96 of book source listed below, Henry William King is listed as a member, so I assume Henry began being a member in 1886 also.

There is an entry describing him thusly:

HENRY WILLIAM KING (1828-1898), clothing manufacturer, King moved to Chicago from New York in 1854, entering business on South Water Street, and in 1868 he and W.C. Browning and other associated organized the wholesale clothing house of Henry W. King & Company. After the great fire the company moved to the wholesale clothing district around Market and Franklin streets. King became president of Browning, King & Company, the largest wholesale clothing firm in the U.S. He was also prominent in charitable work and was president of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society during the period of the great fire. In 1923 Browning King and Company established the first radio advertising when the Browning King Dance Orchestra went on the air. No direct advertising was permitted – not even a mention of what Browning King’s business was. But the company’s name was attached to the orchestra which had been contracted to broadcast exclusively for browning King, and no other firm. For the first time, entertainers and a sponsor were formally linked. The Kings’ daughter, Elizabeth married in 1888 Cyrus Bentley II, attorney for Chicago’s McCormick family. H.W. King’s wife, Aurelia, wrote a long personal account of the Chicago fire of 1871; she died in 1900.

Walter S. Gurnee, who is part of my Freeman line (My Family Tree II) is also listed as member on page 68.

Charles Bohan King was born in November, 1831, at Martinsburg New York. He was a Banker.

Charles married Miss Ella Garfield (a relative of President Garfield). She was born in 1844, in Chillicothe, Ohio.

They had four children, Harriet (King) Klebs; Alice (King) Gade; Rockwell (B.A. Princeton 1904), who died January 31, 1919; and Charles Garfield King (Chuck), our classmate (died September 14, 1945)

Charles Bohan King, had come to Chicago from upstate New York in 1863. Charles was in wholesale grocery firm of Barrett, King & Co., 1864-5, then jobber in hats, caps and furs as member of firm of King, Carhart & Co., 1865-1867, and of King Brothers 1867-1891; since then retired. President and director of Commercial Safe Deposit Co. since 1855. Republican. Presbyterian. Office: 88 Monroe St. Residence: 159 Rush st.

Source: The Chicago blue book of selected names of Chicago and suburban towns (1890)

In 1905, Charles Bohan King had a summer retreat house built in Chicago’s North Shore/Lake Forest area.

“The house dates back to 1905, when the architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, who designed many North Shore manors, built the place as a summer getaway for Charles B. King, a prosperous Chicago banker. Shaw gave the house broad overhangs to shade the four family bedrooms and a curvaceous main staircase that winds around the perimeter of a grand foyer. Eventually the place passed on to King’s son, Charles G. King, a wealthy stockbroker, who called the house and its 50 acres Kingdom Come Farm.”

Source: Chicago Magazine, November 2007

Now interestingly enough, this crosses into another direct line of mine, The Peter Lynch Yoe part.

Peter Lynch Yoe, is one of the men responsible for founding Lake Forest College, and the “Lake Forest” residential area. The Lake Forest Association is organized in February at the Second Presbyterian Church in Chicago and purchased 1300 acres of land.

Half of the land was permanently set aside as association property, 62 acres were set apart as an inalienable campus. The plat for the town of Lake Forest was recorded July 23rd, 1857.

Some other points of the timeline, (one of the sources of the above), that were interesting were:

In 1895:

The Lake Forest Golf Club is formed and a nine-hole course is designed on the Leander McCormick farm.

The Great Lakes Naval Training Center is authorized there in Lake Forest.

In a funny coincidence, this is where my husband Mike McClaughry went to boot camp, during the Vietnam War Time period. He was then on the USS Kitty Hawk. He was a DMIII (Draftsman III) Petty Officer 3rd Class. He worked in IOIC (Intelligence). His unit briefed the pilots on their daily missions.

In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt signed the act authorizing the construction of the station and directed the Navy to make Great Lakes the biggest and the best Naval Training Station in the world. Rear Admiral Albert A. Ross raised the flag on the site July 1, 1905, and took possession of the land for the government. He was the station’s first commander. Ross Field and Auditorium on mainside are named in his honor. More than 100,000 men trained at Great Lakes during the First World War.

The Charles Garfield King home on Ridge Road is constructed. [This appears to be an error from this source, as Chicago Mag says it was built by Charles Bohan King, the house later passed to his son Charles Garfield King]

Charles Garfield King was born February 21, 1873 in Chicago, where he had lived all his life. His parents were Charles Bohan King (brother of Henry W. King, my direct line) and Ella S. Garfield. Charles G. went to Yale, and was a member of:

He graduated in 1894.

He traveled until 1896, when he entered the business of mortgage banking. He began as a member of Shanklin & King mortgage bankers 1894-1900, engaged in brokerage business since 1900, and in 1906 organized the present firm of King, Farnum & Co., of which he is a senior member., which in 1911 took over the accounts of the old established house of John H. Wrenn and Company, of Chicago. From this partnership he withdrew in February, 1917. From August 1917, to April 1918, he was in France under Stanley Field, helping in the American Red Cross. Member New York and Chicago stock exchanges and Chicago Board of Trade. Republican. Cluns: University, racquet (New York), Chicago. Recreation: golf. Summer Residence: Lake Forest, Illinois. Resident: 2913 Michigan Avenue. Office: 128 S. LaSalle Street.

He was married January 6, 1898, in Chicago, to Miss Ginevra Fuller, a Farmington graduate. Five children have been born: Ginevra, November 1, 1898; Charles Garfield, Jr. June 4 1900, who dies in infancy; Margery, December 9, 1903; barbara, November 17, 1909; and Garfield, October 5, 1913.

Charles died September 14, 1945.

Source: Quarter-century record, class of 1894 Yale College By Yale University. Class of 1894, Frederick Dwight (1922)
Source: The book of Chicagoans: a biographical dictionary of leading living men of the city of Chicago. edited by Albert Nelson Marquis, 1911

To illustrate the inter-relationships between my relatives, the Freemans, Forgans and Kings, note that my great-grandfather John Edgar Freeman, brother of Halstead Gurnee Freeman and Charles Yoe Freeman, married the grand-daughter of Henry W. King (whose nephew is Charles Garfield King) Roxana Pomeroy. (See My Family Tree) Halstead had married Marion Forgan, the daughter of David Robertson Forgan (brother of James Berwick Forgan). (see Family Tree II for more details).

So with that all in mind, see this:

John Edgar Freeman Sr., married Roxana Pomeroy February 26, 1916 in Chicago.

The Financier, New York, Voume CVIII – July 1, 1916U.S. LIGHT & HEAT CORPORATION (plant at Niagara Falls New York) – A protective committee has been organized composed of George C. Van Tuyl, Jr., president Metropolitan Trust Co.; David R. Forgan, president National City Bank of Chicago, and Chauncey L. Lane, secretary U.S. Light and Heat Corp. The committee organized by King, Farnum & Co. is opposed to independent committee composed of Presspritch, Wilson and Spencer, and is seeking proxies. King, Farnum & Co. announce they have purchased $500,000 6 oer cent. First mortgage bonds and other treasury securities of company. And offer to exchange $100 in bonds for thirteen shares preferred stock of company until July 20 or such time as entire $500,000 has been exchanged.

The “Farnum” part of King, Farnum & Co., is Henry W. Farnum, who I found the following bit about. On March 1912, he had been involved with Virginia Railway Co. , a first mortgage 5 per cent bonds which were to become due May 1, 1962.

King, Farnum & Co., is also discussed in the Congressional Pujo Hearings of 1912.

“The Pujo Committee found that the officers of the five largest New York banks held 341 directorships in 112 major corporations.”

“And as revealed in the 1912 Congressional Pujo Committee hearings, WestinghouseSTOOD ALONE in all of American industry, as free of control of the New York Bankers.”

Ginevra King
Ginevra King was the eldest of the three daughters of Charles Garfield King.
She married twice, first to William Mitchell and second to John T. Pirie, Jr.,who was the grandson of one of the founders of Carson Pirie Scott & Co.

Which, interestingly enough, coincides with something in my father’s line – not by blood, but by relationship. My father’s sister Mary Alice Robertson married a descendant of the Scott part of Carson Pirie Scott & Co. (department store in Chicago) – Robert Scott III.

Carson Pirie Scott & Company was founded by Irish immigrants Samuel Carson and John T. Pirie. The two men started from northern Ireland together aboard The Philadelphia, which shipwrecked off Newfoundland. Undeterred, Carson and Pirie found another ship to take them all the way to New York. From there, they went west to the railroad town of Amboy, Illinois, where they opened a dry goods store in 1854. This first store was housed modestly in a remodeled saloon, but in only four years, Carson & Pirie had branch stores in four nearby towns, making it one of the first chain stores in the United States. By 1864 Carson & Pirie had entered the Chicago market with a wholesale operation on downtown Lake Street. This early wholesale business was quite profitable, and the company soon built new quarters on State Street. This building perished in the great Chicago fire of 1871, which also destroyed 60 percent of the firm’s goods. The remainder was saved only because one of Carson’s partners flagged down teamsters as the building burned, and promised them 50 silver dollars for every wagonload they could haul from the flames.

The company moved into new quarters after the fire. In 1890 Carson and Pirie took on a new partner, Robert Scott, son of another Irish immigrant who had worked at the Amboy store. The company was then called Carson, Pirie Scott & Company. In 1904 the firm moved into a 12-story building on State Street, a beautiful tower designed by the renowned American architect Louis Sullivan. This distinctive building was named a Chicago Historical Landmark in 1959…

Carson Pirie Scott operated in the shadow of another venerable department store, Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company. The two chains had flagship stores only a few doors apart in downtown Chicago. Carson Pirie Scott aimed to sell to middle-income customers, and it was not as large or well-known as the more upscale Field’s.

Source: answers.com article

Back to Ginevra King:

… In 1915, King’s daughter Ginevra was a 16-year-old beauty, one of Chicago’s “Big Four” debutantes, visiting St. Paul, Minnesota. There she met and became, in her words, “dipped about” Scott Fitzgerald, then a student at Princeton. Their romance, conducted primarily through their letters to each other, lasted about two years, according to The Perfect Hour, a book about their relationship by James L. W. West III, a professor of English at Penn State.

… Regardless of whether he saw the house, Fitzgerald went on to immortalize Ginevra—who abruptly broke up with the middle-class Minnesotan to marry a rich Chicago boy—in The Great Gatsby. She is widely acknowledged as a significant inspiration for Daisy Buchanan, the fragile goddess from Louisville who tossed over the striving Jay Gatsby to marry the rich Chicagoan Tom Buchanan.

By the time of Fitzgerald’s visit, the estate on Ridge Road was obviously belonging to Charles Garfield King.

One of Chicago’s significant literary landmarks, the Lake Forest home of the self-possessed society belle who was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first love and the model for the radiantly self-centered Daisy Buchanan in his novel The Great Gatsby, is for sale for the first time in more than 50 years.

The Daily Mail recently (2013) ran an article concerning the background of my Great-Great cousin-by-blood Ginevra King and F. Scott Fitsgerald’s fascination with her. For historical purposes, I include the text here as it contains quite a bit of interesting information of this relative of mine.

Fitzgerald and Ginevra first met in early 1915 at a party in his home town, St Paul in Minnesota. Scott’s father was a wholesale grocer, his mother the descendant of Irish immigrants. The family were scraping by, with help from a small inheritance.

In Fitzgerald’s later book – The Great Gatsby – character: Daisy was Fitzgerald’s most successful attempt to capture his dream girl in words.

Both his older sisters had died in infancy, and his mother doted on him. Though he was a lazy student and hopeless at sports, the money was found to send him to Princeton.

Ginevra’s family came from a different social world. Her grandfathers had both prospered during the American Civil War of the 1860s; by the turn of the century the Kings were American aristocracy.

They moved in the best circles in Chicago, and gave themselves airs. ‘Ginevra’ had been a family name for generations, adopted because it sounded aristocratic: Leonardo da Vinci had painted the portrait of a Florentine noblewoman, Ginevra de’ Benci.

Wealthy, young and destined to be fought over by the most eligible men, Ginevra and her three best friends at her private boarding school, Westover, formed a secret society. They called themselves the Big Four, and wore identical rose-gold rings on their little fingers, like a club emblem.

‘Ginevra was not terribly serious about school,’ said her biographer, Professor James West of Pennsylvania State University, this week. ‘She liked her friends, and friendship. She was beautiful and socially poised. She understood that it’s family, social position and wealth or poverty that have the authority in life, at least in her social circles.’

Ginevra spent the Christmas holidays of 1914 in St Paul with one of her ‘Big Four’ chums, ‘Midge’ Hersey, and just after New Year was introduced to Fitzgerald while they were out sledging. He was three years her senior, and she thought him attractive.

‘Scott perfectly darling,’ she jotted in her diary on January 4. The next day she added: ‘Am absolutely gone on Scott.’

Within a week she was writing to ask for his photograph, on the pretext that she couldn’t remember what he looked like: ‘I have but a faint recollection of yellow hair and big blue eyes and a brown corduroy waist-coat that was very good-looking!’

Fitzgerald was enchanted. He never questioned that he had the qualities that would make a girl fall in love. ‘I didn’t have the top two things,’ he reasoned, ‘great animal magnetism or money. I had the two second things, tho’, good looks and intelligence.’

And Ginevra had everything to bewitch his heart. Although he always suspected her of playing a part.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

As early as the spring of 1915, King was starting to show annoyance at having to fend off Fitzgerald’s insinuations about her thoughts and love life. “Never say again that I’m going to marry Deering!” she scolded in November of 1915. She responded to Fitzgerald’s complaint that she permitted him to idealize her by saying, quite sensibly, whose fault is that? “She got the feeling that Fitzgerald was more interested in her as a character than as a human being,” says West.

On July 15, 1918, she writes to tell him that on the following day she will announce her engagement to William Mitchell, in what her granddaughter believes was something of an arranged marriage between two prominent Chicago families. “She was a willing participant, I’m sure,” says Chandler. “My grandfather was drop-dead handsome and a real charmer. What I don’t think they ever figured out was what it was going to be like to live in the same house together.”

In a sense she made the same choice Daisy Buchanan did, accepting the safe haven of money rather than waiting for a truer love to come along. Sports would remain a passion. She rode, shot, and spent hours working on her golf game with Edith Cummings, another of the Big Four, who won the 1923 U.S. Women’s Amateur and appeared on the cover of Time magazine as The Fairway Flapper. Cummings, whom Fitzgerald probably knew through King, seems to have been the inspiration for Jordan Baker, Daisy Buchanan’s more likable, down-to-earth friend.

King and Mitchell had three children in a marriage that lasted 19 years. She then went off with John T. Pirie, a married Lake Forest businessman, leaving broken hearts on both sides. Pirie, an outdoorsy type who raised springer spaniels, was a much better match for King. She later founded the Ladies Guild of the American Cancer Society and was active in local arts.

Another source has:

Fitzgerald had been introduced to Ginevra King, a debutante from Lake Forest, Illinois and daughter of the fabulously wealthy Charles Garfield King, by his St. Paul friend Marie Hersey in January 1915. Along with a host of other suitors, he had pursued Ginevra the following year. Just sixteen when they met, Ginevra visited Scott at Princeton and rendezvoused with him in New York at the Midnight Frolic and Ritz Roof. But it was a superficial romance which Fitzgerald fantasized out of proportion. And there was unpleasant gossip. Scott overheard somebody remark at a house party they attended in Lake Forest that “poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls,” and believed the comment was directed at him.

The Midnight frolic, mentioned above, was party time with Ziegfield in the “teens” of the 20th century. They were wild shows and parties, on the roof of the New Amsterdam hotel. The “ziegfield girls” as they were called, were the main source of entertainment, but many other “new” music artists strutted their stuff as well.

This is immortalized in the 2013 movie – The Great Gatsby, as is Ginevra King (with a little zelda thrown in) romance with F. Scott Fitzgerald.

My daughter got a big kick out of knowing this was one of her relatives – she loves that movie.

The real Midnight Frolic –

It was created by Ziegfeld – who loved to parade beautiful women at these Midnight Frolics, in shocking or unusual ways. They were called – the Ziegfeld girls and they were beautiful.

Ziegfeld

The Ziegfeld Girls

These next four pictures are part of the ‘Illuminants” series – where Ziegfeld designed the four forms of illumination. Candle Light, Moonlight, Lantern Light, Sun Light and Electric Light – Ziegfeld Follies Midnight Frolic

There was also something called The Balloon Dance –

And here’s Fitgerald and Zelda at one of these “midnight frolics”.

Zelda and Fitzgerald

Scene from the 2013 Great Gatbsy movie – Ginevra King, Fitzgerald’s character Daisy

The real Ginevra King – “Daisy”

You can see the similarity – they did a good job of casting “daisy” in that movie.

When Ginevra announced her upcoming marriage to Ensign William Mitchell. Mitchell served with the U.S. naval aviation corps during World War I, working as a flight instructor in Key West, Florida.

Fitzgerald was crushed and propelled himself into a world of debauchery and alcoholism – a self-destructive attempt to drown himself in the Ziegfield mockery of the world he would never be allowed to be a part of – the world of the Kings, the “American aristocracy”. It’s something you have to be “born” into – you see, it’s all very British that way.

Ginevra’s father Charles, of course did NOT approve of Fitzgerald at all and let him know it in no uncertain terms.

Charles King – Ginevra’s dad, he was a wealthy stockbroker

Mitchell was the “right” kind of husband – besides, he also had lots of ponies!

In September 1918, Ginevra married Mitchell. After the WWI ended, he became a successful stockbroker, like his father-in-law. Ginevra only had two further contacts with Scott Fitzgerald after that.

They moved into their mansion.

William Mitchell was the son of Louise Jewett and John J. Mitchell, who founded Illinois Merchants Trust & Savings Bank, (which later merged with the Continental National Bank and Trust Company).

His namesake, (probably his grandfather) was an early Railroad man – William H. Mitchell, who died in 1910.

After attending Harvard University, William Mitchell (the 2nd) enlisted in the Navy during World War I.

Upon completing flight training, he was assigned to the Blue Devils, America`s first stunt flying team.

June 10, 1917
Four months ago Mrs. John J. Mitchell, offered her three sons to the nation. Her husband was president of the Illinois Trust and Savings bank.

“If war comes,” she said, “I want them to be at the front. They have been richly blessed by this country. They have had the chance to get good educations and prepare for whatever careers they choose. They owe a real debt to the country and I would not be the one to stop them from paying it.”

The three sons were: William H., John J. Mitchell, Jr. and Clarence. Two of the sons, John J. and William H. joined the new army air force and were trained first at the Great Lakes Naval Training station and then Mastie, Long Island. On Long Island, these two sons, raised in wealth, were 9 miles from a store and 5 miles from the railroad. They were eating army “chow” which must have been a shock. Clarence, the youngest boy was in school at Concord, Mass.

John Jr. was seriously injured in an air crash while training at Key West, Fl. Thomas W. Eaton, the other pilot was killed. They were both attempting to land when they collided. He never made it to the war front. William H. after completing flight training was assigned to the Blue Devils, American’s first stunt flying team.

In December, 1920, John Jr., married Lolita Armour in the great mansion that we visited on our history tour in July, 2010.

Note the marriage to Lolita Armour – yet another intermarriage in my family tree to the J. Ogden Armour branch – that Catherine Gurnee Freeman (daughter of Chicago Mayer Walter S. Gurnee) had one of her family marry into. (see My Family Tree II)

Mr. and Mrs. J. Ogden Armour of Chicago, have made formal announcement of the, engagement of their only daughter, Lolita Armour,, to John J. Mitchell, Jr., son of the chairman of the board of directors of three of Chicago’s largest banks. Miss Armour is the heiress to a fortune which is conservatively estimated at $60,000,000. young Mitchell will share In a fortune estimated at $10,000,000. From her birth, in 1897, Miss Armour was the victim of a congenital dislocation of both hip joints.

More on John Jr.’s accident – from newspaper articles of the marriage announcement.

Young Mitchell was.a sophomore at Yale when the war began. He enlisted in the naval aviation service, was commissioned as an ensign, and sent to Key West, Fla. While there he was in an accident which nearly cost him his life. Youns; Mitchell’s airplane collided with one operated by Student Aviator Thomas W. Eaton of Wilmington, Del., when both were about 100 feet in the air, as Eaton was spiraling downward when he struck Mitchell, who was flying straight. Both machines crashed to the ground and Eaton was picked up dead. Young Mitchell’s injuries were severe.

It sounds like both John and Lolita are crippled in some way.

As to William Mitchell (the one who married Ginevra) I can find no record of these “Blue Devil” that did stunt flying for the U.S. Air force during World War I – perhaps it is the wrong name?

If anyone knows who “the first stunt flying group” was that Mitchell was part of – please let me know in the comments section.

In the year following their marriage (1919) with the backing of his father and other wealthy Chicagoans, William Mitchell co-founded Mitchell, Hutchins & Co., an investment firm whose name, despite its 1980 acquisition by Paine Weber, remained in place until 2001. Mitchell retired in 1964, but still remained honorary chairman.

New York Times – June 21, 1919

Mitchell was a life trustee of the Field Museum of Natural History, Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Northwestern University. He also was a benefactor of Brookfield Zoo, the Chicago Horticultural Society, the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army.

His 1987 Obituary in the Chicago Tribune revealed something very interesting to me. He had a house in Hope Ranch, Santa Barbara, California – exactly the same ritzy area that my mother’s parents lived (and my father’s)! (See My Family Tree)

A memorial service for William H. Mitchell, 92, an investment banker, philanthropist and World War I aviator, will be held at 4:30 p.m. Monday in the Church of the Holy Spirit, 400 E. Westminster Ave., Lake Forest.

Mr. Mitchell, of Lake Forest, died Saturday at his winter home in Santa Barbara, Calif.

He had been a director of Texaco Inc. and Continental Illinois National Bank & Trust Co. of Chicago for more than 30 years.

In 1939, Ginevra left Mitchell to marry John T. Pirie, the grandson of a founder of Carson, Pirie Scott & Co – he was considered a “much better match” for her.

Philo Rockwell King

Philo Rockwell King, Jr. was born May 17, 1875, at Chicago, Ill., the son of Philo Rockwell King, a retired wholesale hatter of Chicago, and of Mary A. (Shaw) King. Ph.B., 1898

A Philo R. King is listed on the Illinois marriage records site as having married a Minnie Morrison in 1870 on June 21 at Cook County, Illinois, however the Yale book of living graduates shows his having two sons, whose mother is Mary Shaw King.

Philo Rockwell King, JR., is listed as being a publisher, LeClaire-King Company, Davenport, Iowa, with his residence as: Kemper Hall, 11th and Main Sts., Davenport, Iowa.

Source: Quindecennial record of the Class of 1896, Sheffield Scientific School of Science By Guy Erastus Beardsley, Yale University. Sheffield Scientific School. Class of 1896 (1912)

William A. King

Another son of Philos’ was William A. King, who worked for Standard Oil since 1903.

Source: Quindecennial record of the Class of 1896, Sheffield Scientific School of Science By Guy Erastus Beardsley, Yale University. Sheffield Scientific School. Class of 1896 (1912)

Philo R. King the First, and Delavan Lake, Wisconsin

“Delavan is rich in both its architectural and circus history as well as its beautiful lake. More than a century ago, Delavan was home to traveling circus troups attracted to its bountiful fields and lakes. Hundreds of clowns and circus performers from over 26 circuses set up their winter quarters in Delavan from 1847 to 1894. In 1847, a year before Wisconsin attained statehood and 24 years before the Ringling Brothers raised their first tent in Baraboo, the Mabie Brothers US Olympic Circus stayed at the present site of Lake Lawn Resort on Delavan Lake, where it created a circus dynasty that survived in Wisconsin for the next 100 years. The P.T. Barnum Circus, “The Greatest Show On Earth”, was founded in Delavan in 1871.”
Philo had a vacation home in Delavan lake in Wisconsin, William Henry Bush visited him in August 1894.

Philo had been one of the men responsible for making Delavan Lake more hospitable during the summer months, and had formed an association to try and fix the water levels problem.

The Delavan Lake Improvement Association (DLIA) was officially organized on Aug. 10, 1895, at a meeting held at the Log Cabin Resort on Willow Point. Philo R. King was elected president and Walter E. Wells, secretary-treasurer.

Philo Rockwell King’s house in Chicago’s Gold Coast is considered a Historical House.

Philo R. King House
1434 N. Dearborn Pkwy
Built in 1876, Architect unknown

Bullock House is 1454 (red stone on right)… Second Empire town house. In addition to the characteristic mansard roof (still shingled in slate), there is abundant Classical detail. A pavilion effect was created by setting back the entrance bay and emphasizing the north corner with pilasters and incised quoins. The Wilson (1450) and King (1434) houses share many of the details, with crisp incised ornament giving them even more of a French flavor.

Francis M. King was born January 5, 1863 in Chicago, Cook County, Ill., January 5, 1863, died 1927. (he is also referred to as Francis P. King for some reason) His parents were Henry William King and Aurelia Roxana Case. Francis married June 12, 1890, to Louisa Boyd Yeomans. Her father was a Presbyterian minister from Massachusetts and her mother was from Baltimore. Her parents valued highly reading, religion, and music.

Francis and Louisa had 3 children, one of which was named after Francis’s father Henry William King.

Henry William King the 2nd, married Emily Bleecker in 1919, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1946. Emily was the daughter of Russell Bleecker and Emily Fisk Blunt. Henry William King the 2nd was a 1916 graduate of Williams College and was a naval officer, according to his engagement announcement in the New York Times. In 1923, he formed the Browning King Dance Orchestra to play on WEAF radio in New York, the FIRST radio sponsorship deal.

Just prior to his marriage to Louisa, in 1889, May 7, Francis P. King delivers an address at the opening of the Johns Hopkins Hospital:

“About six hundred people attend ceremonies formally opening The Johns Hopkins Hospital. Mrs. Daniel Coit Gilman, writing to her daughters, describes the occasion: “Of course the great event of the week has been the opening of the hospital. The day was superb and all the buildings in apple pie order; grounds ditto. The exercises were in the administration building and a band of twenty- five instruments was in the third gallery. There was plenty of bunting and flowering plants and ladies in their gay dresses and it was a very pretty scene. Mr. Francis King made an excellent little address and Dr. Billings a very sensible one and Papa touched the popular heart as usual. I think all the speeches struck a very high note. There was no self-glorification, no mere spread eagle and empty oratory but a tone of earnest responsibility in the presence of a great trust. I think everyone must have been struck with it.””

Francis was a Delegate to Republican National Convention from Michigan, 1908; and was a member of Michigan state senate 25th District, 1913-14. His religion was Presbyterian.

In 1913 he organized and became president of the Alma Truck Co. which eventually became Republic Truck. Republic proved very successful and by 1920 it had become one of the major truck manufacturers in the nation.

In 1898, after the death of Henry King, the Francis Kings moved into the home of his mother. (Aurelia Roxana Case King)

During this time, Louisa became interested in the gardens of her mother-in-law. However, it was not until Louisa moved into the McCormick home (1898) at Claremont and Prospect Avenues that she established her first garden. This began her lifelong avocation with gardening and horticulture. Her contributions include several books on these subjects. She dedicated her last book, “From A New Garden,” to her mother-in-law. Louisa received many awards and honors, including a memorial planting of dogwood in the National Arboretum in Washington D.C. and a rose named in her honor.

After the death of Mrs. King in 1901, the estate was sold to Mrs. Henry Gorden Selfridge, and later was purchased in 1905 by Thomas E. Wilder. Wilder renamed the estate “Lancaster Lodge,” after his original home in Lancaster, Massachusetts.

Before his death in 1919, Mr. Wilder offered the northern six acres of the estate to the City of Elmhurst, with the stipulation that a library be built within five years. Unable to fulfill its commitment, the City called a meeting of the Park District Board and the Library Board. An agreement was reached whereby the Park Board would purchase the southern six acres for $45,000.

Upon completion of the purchase, the City would cede the northern six acres to the Park District. The City would then purchase the Wilder home and one acre surrounding it for $14,000 and cede that to the Library Board for the establishment of a library. Upon completion of these transactions, the Wilder estate became Wilder Park, containing the original greenhouse on the southern six acres.

In 1902 the decline in Francis health led to a decision to seek treatment in Alma, Michigan. It was reputed that King sought treatment for alcoholism, a specialty of the Alma sanitarium. By 1903 he was cured. Mrs. King, never particularly comfortable living in an urban setting, seems to have been very pleased by the family’s decision to remain in rural Alma. The couple purchased a half-square city block, about two acres, on Alma’s most desirable street and ordered the large, red brick house then on the property removed.

House and Garden magazine declared her the “fairy godmother of gardening.”

Louisa King became one of the foremost authorities on gardening. Her writing career spanned over 15 years. Louisa’s books are written for the layperson, and focus more on pleasing arrangements of garden design. Her first book, The Well Considered Garden, was published in 1915. She dedicated this book to my great-great-great grandmother Aurelia Roxana King.

In 1914, in Ambler, Pennsylvania, a group of women organized a gardening club originally named the Women’s National, Agricultural and Horticultural Association. In Boston, two years later the organization was renamed the Woman’s National Farm and Garden Association, as it is known today. The singular woman’s is used to emphasize the individual responsibility of each member. The Michigan Division was founded June 16, 1926, in Alma, Michigan at the home of Mrs. Francis King. She became the President of the Association, and served in that capacity until 1920 She spent winters in St. Augustine Florida, where she was named Godmother for the Garden Club of Florida formed in 1922.

The Mrs. Francis King Dogwood Garden at the National Arboretum, Washington, D.C., was built as a tribute to Mrs. King for her devoted service to helping develop Farm and Garden.

The substantial income made possible by her husband’s company Republic Trucking’s success enabled Mrs. King to indulge her interests in gardening and to develop a subtantial garden around their home.

In 1921 the Horticultural Society of Massachusetts awarded her the George Robert White medal – making her the first female recipient and only one of two women to receive it until 1968. Mrs. King was a prominent figure listed in Who’s Who of America. As well as her national and local involvement in gardening clubs and the Civic League she was a strong voice in the Women’s League of Voters and was a Feminist.

The unexpected and untimely death of Francis in 1927 left his widow financially unable to maintain the lifestyle she had enjoyed for many years. Although she was by no means destitute, the house and garden were sold and Mrs. King left Alma for Europe.

After an extended tour of Europe, Mrs. King returned to the States in 1928 to campaign for Herbert Hoover. Traveling by train from a radio address in Schenectady, New York, she happened upon a conversation with two women who spoke so highly of their town of South Hatford, New York, that Mrs. King chose to investigate a house for sale in the community. She was charmed by a “sweet and stately little white house” which she promptly purchased. There she began a new garden, naming it Kingstree.

Mrs. King continued to write in her new home, although at a lesser rate than in her years in Alma. She published The Story of the Garden in 1932 and Planning Your Planting for Montgomery Ward in 1943. Until the very end of her life she continued to lecture and give gardening advice. Following World War II she became a strong supporter of the United Nations and the proposed idea of the International Horticultural Society.

Upon her death, in January 1948, Mrs. King’s ashes were spread over her garden at Kingstree.

In 1937, a beautiful white rose was patented and introduced bearing her name.

Updated November 7, 2010Added info that my Great-Great-Grandfather Peter L. Yoe was part of the men that founded and purchased “Lake Forest” , both the residential area and the Lake Forest College Campus.
Added more info on David Robertson Forgan and Commercial Credit in 1912
Added a picture of Marion Forgan

John Newton Freeman was the son of John Edgar Freeman and Mary Ann Beach. His parents were missionaries at Allahabad on the Ganges, in the Northwest Provinces of India and he was born there July 17, 1844. His sister Fanny Lucetta Freeman was a deaf mute from early illness while in India, and after their mother died they both came back to America with their father. Fanny was put in an institution for those so impaired, and John was placed in the care of John Labar, at Hackettstown, in the New Jersey hills, while his father prepared to go back to his work as a missionary. His father married again, to Elizabeth Vredenburgh. He and his new wife went back to India where they were both killed in the Mutiny of 1857. They were among the missionaries and others who were treacherously enticed into the boats on the river and deliberately shot down. The beautiful Memorial Chapel at Cawnpore rises over the well into which their poor bodies were thrown.

John Newton Freeman became proficient in the sign-language and took a position as an instructor in the New York Institution for the Deaf Mutes at Washington Heights, where his sister had been an inmate and a teacher,—which he held for two years. He then attended the Seminary course at Princeton, and was called to the First Presbyterian Church, Peekskill on the Hudson. He was ordained May 17, 1868, and served in that field till 1876. He was next pastor at Lockport, N. Y., for some years, till 1881, when he was called to Immanuel Church, Milwaukee, where he preached till 1889. The Centre Church at Denver drew him across the plains, and he spent eight years at the foot of the Rockies. In 1897 he went to Calvary Church, Cleveland, remaining till 1901, when he resigned and after 4 years of “special work” in New York City, he moved his family to Chicago in 1905. He was then chosen Associate Minister in the Fourth Presbyterian Church and became minister in charge for 1 year between 1908 and 1909 and then an associate minister again with Dr. Stone until January 1, 1910. From September 11, 1910 to December 31, 1912, he was asked to be the minister in charge of the First Presbyterian Church during the sometimes rough transition of merging the fourty-first street Presbyterian Church. He then continued as associate minister until July 1, 1913.

He was made a Doctor of Divinity, honoris causa, by Princeton in 1891.

John Newton Freeman

Dr. Freeman married while at Peekskill Miss Kate Benedict, of New York, on the 17th June, 1868. She died March 10, 1870. His daughter Kate Benedict is the wife of Prof. Jesse B. Carter, Ph. D., of Princeton University. After the death of his first wife, he married Mary Helen Yoe in 1872 and had the following children.

Mary Helen Yoe Freeman was born in 1849, and was the daughter of Peter L. Yoe and Catherine Gurnee Yoe.

Her father Peter was born 11 March 1804, and died 17 July 1862. Peter Lynch Yoe is listed in the 1843 Chicago Directory as working for W.S. Gurnee (his future wife’s brother) as a book-keeper of Gurnee & Matteson (Joseph Matteson) located at 116 Lake street. The firm sold groceries, hardware and leather.

Peter Lynch Yoe, is one of the men responsible for founding Lake Forest College, and the “Lake Forest” residential area. The Lake Forest Association is organized in February at the Second Presbyterian Church in Chicago and purchased 1300 acres of land.

Half of the land was permanently set aside as association property, 62 acres were set apart as an inalienable campus. The plat for the town of Lake Forest was recorded July 23rd, 1857.

By the time of the great Chicago Fire, November 25, 1871, Peter Yoe and family were living at Terrace Row, considered one of the most splendid blocks in Chicago.

A description of the fire in the area:

Excerpted

“In this hopeless frame of mind I rode home to look after my residence and family, intently watching, these ominous eastward movement of the flames.

I at once set to work with my family and friends to move as much of my furniture as possible across the narrow park east of Michigan avenue onto the shore of the lake, a distance of about three hundred feet. At the same time I sent my family to the house of some friends in the south part of the city for safety; my daughter, Miss Jessie Bross, was the last to leave us. The work of carrying our furniture across the avenue to the shore was lost, difficult and even dangerous. For six or eight hours Michigan avenue was jammed with every description of vehicle containing families escaping from the city, or baggage wagons laden with goods and furniture.”

“In the mean time the fire had lapped up the Palmer House, the theatres, and The Tribune building; and, contrary to our expectation, for we thought the current of the fire would pass my residence, judging by the direction of the wind, we saw by the advancing clouds of dense black smoke, and the rapidly approaching flames, that we were in imminent peril. The fire had already worked so far south and east as to attack the stables in the rear of the Terrace Block, between Van Buren and Congress streets. Many friends rushed into the houses in the block and helped to carry out heavy furniture, such as pianos and book-cases. We succeeded in carrying the bulk of it to the shore, where it now lies stored; much of it, however, is seriously damaged.

There I and a few others sat by our household goods,silently awaiting the contemplation of the coming destruction of our property- one of the most splendid blocks in Chicago. The eleven fine houses which compose the block were occupied by Denton Gurnee, Peter L. Yoe, Mrs. Humphreys (owned by Mrs.Walker), William Bross, P. F. W. Peck, S. C. Griggs, Tuthill King, Judge U. T. Dickey, Gen. Cook, John L. Clarke, and J. Y. Scaramon.”

Mary Helen Yoe’s mother Catherine Gurnee, (born August 30, 1816), was the daughter of Halstead Gurnee (born June 4, 1776 and died March 15, 1822 Rockland County, New York) and Hannah Coe, (born May 26 1784 and died May 4, 1837) Catherine’s parents were married May 27, 1801 in Kakiat (Haverstraw), Rockland County, New York. The Gurnees were of Scottish Ancestry.

Catherine had 6 brothers and sisters, one of which was Walter Smith Gurnee.

Walter S. Gurnee was a director of the “Hydraulic Company” and Walter was City Treasurer in 1843, he is 3 years older than Catherine. He married Mary M. Coe and had 7 children. Walter, as the story goes, is why there is a place called “Glencoe” in the Chicago area. A ritzy area of Chicago made immortal in the movie Risky Business. In 1873, Walter was a member of the board of directors for the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad,and when the trains arrived in Gurnee, they named the train station after him. (He had also been President of the railroad in 1854).

Walter S. Gurnee

Walter was born the son of a wealthy tanner in New York in 1813. His father had made a small fortune in the business in New York and sent his son west, with financial backing in hand. He arrived in Chicago in 1836, where he started a tannery business. He also dealt in insurance and real estate, becoming one of the larger landowners in the Chicago area. He is also credited with the founding of Winnetka as well as the land he owned, which would eventually become Highland Park. Gurnee was elected the 11th mayor of Chicago in 1851 and at that time mayoral terms lasted one year, but he was elected again in 1852. Under his administration, the Board of Health was created.

In 1853, Walter bought a 12,000 acre tract from his in-laws called the “Coe Stock Farm”. He built a house known as “The Castle”. It featured landscaped grounds with rare trees and shrubs imported from England, Scotland and China as well as an orchard in which varieties of apples and pears were grown.

The area where he built his house, is called Glencoe, and it’s said that it was named after Glencoe, Scotland, where Walter Gurnees’ family was from, and inspired by the ravines in this area of Illinois.

Glencoe, Scotland is a spectacularly beautiful place.

a stream in Glencoe

Gurnee attempted to run for mayor of Chicago again in 1860, but “Long” John Wentworth, a former mayor and U.S. Representative, defeated him in a bitter election.

Gurnee (middle) and Wentworth

Walter declared bankruptcy in 1862, went back to New York in 1863 and purchased land in Westchester County, but still maintained his business ties to Chicago. He sold his house to Dr. Alexander Hammond four years later, and it was he who actually “built the town” then, of Glencoe, Illinois.

On July 22, 1887, Walter S. Gurnee (who had been one of the original financial backers of the West Side & Yonkers Patent Ry)incorporated the New York & Long Island Railroad Co. under the New York State General Railroad Act of 1850. The certificate of incorporation (#4599) was filed in Albany eight days later. The N.Y. & L.I. proposed to build a tunnel (power unspecified) from Long Island City (then a separate municipality) to New York City (Manhattan). In 1930, his son Walter S.Gurnee Jr. and wife are listed in the New York Blue Book of Society as living at 116 E. 53, also “Rock Hill,” and Oyster Bay, Long Island.

Walter Gurnee died at age 90 April 17, 1903 and was buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetary.

He must have had a son, a junior, because in the “NEW YORK SOCIAL BLUE BOOK—1930” in the section (Names & Addresses of Prominent Residents)”- is listed the following:
“Gurnee, Mr. & Mrs. Walter S. 116 E. 53., also “Rock Hill,” Oyster Bay, L.I.”

Brief History of the Armours:

Joseph Ogden Armour was the son of Philip Danforth Armour. J.Ogden had a brother Philip Danforth Jr, who married Mary Lester, and their son was Lester Armour, who was a Commander in the OSS, (D/OSS Chief in London) and tight with James Russell Forgan (brother of Marion Forgan who married Halstead Gurnee Freeman, whose mother was Catherine Gurnee Freeman). In 1947, Lester came on the board of the spy front group – the World Commerce Organization. (see James Russell Forgan)

Catherine Gurnee’s other brother Denton (born September 16, 1810, died May 10, 1878) married Louisa AYRES and they had 2 daughters. Amelia, (born August 19, 1842 and died October 14, 1873), and Carrie Louise (born June 2, 1853). Amelia married Joseph Armour (aka J. Ogden Armour of Armour Meats) September 2, 1869 but she died young. Carrie Louise married Charles Alexander Munn, and had a son Charles Munn Jr., but her second husband was also Joseph Armour! She married him May 3, 1875. Joseph reportedly died from an accidental fall January 5, 1881, leaving Carrie Louise, as sole heir and co-executor of his more than $3 million estate as well as his share in the Armour & Co partnership.

Mary Astor Paul Munn was the daughter of James William Paul, Jr. (1851-1908) and Frances Drexel (1858- 1901), the daughter of Anthony J. Drexel (1826-1893), the financier known as ‘the man who made Wall Street.’

Charles and Mary Munn lived at Woodcrest after her father died in 1908 until 1925, when they sold the property for $1 million to Dr. Joseph Dorrance, the inventor of condensed soup and the president of Campbell’s Soup. It was the highest price paid at the time for a private house in Pennsylvania. Set on more than 200 acres and designed in the Elizabethan half-timber style, today Woodcrest is part of the Cabrini University campus.

Bizarre tragedies seem to beset this branch of the family tree, what with Amelia’s accidental death, her sister Carrie Louise dying in an automobile accident when her car crashed into a tree, and Charles and Mary Munn’s daughter, Pauline, died in Paris at the age of 30 from complications following a foot infection.

Carrie Louise Gurnee Armour’s daughter (also named Carrie Louise) married Reginald Boardman, a Beacon Hill Bostonian, and had 2 children. T. Dennie and Reginald, Jr. She then married Lawrence Waterbury, a Roosevelt cousin.

Halstead was born 17 July 1881, and died December 1970 at Rumson, New Jersey. His wife Marion Forgan, was born in 1887 and died in 1957. They were married 22 January 1916. She was the daughter of David Robertson Forgan, brother of James Berwick Forgan. David Robertson Forgan married Agnes Kerr of Winnipeg, Manitoba and Marion’s other brothers and sisters were Robert Russell, Ethel, David, and James Russell Forgan. David Robertson Forgan died in 1931 on 27 December.

Chicago, Oct. 28, 1913.
Dear Whit
:
Your lettergram did the trick and made me realize that if I am
to cut down the high cost of living I must at least send you a few
lines and thus escape the penalty of lettergrams at 50 cents per.
When cast adrift with the other ’03s to look for a job, I could not
decide definitely at once for a few months who would have the
privilege of paying me for something that I really enjoyed working
at. I drifted around as a day laborer, office boy, shipping clerk, etc.,
and finally settled down for a year and a half with a wholesale book
and stationery firm where I went through all the grades from dusting
books to assistant credit man with some twenty thousand accounts
under my eye.
Then some one suggested that selling bonds was a good way of
getting along and I started with the Chicago office of Wm. A. Read &
Co., in 1905. I have been with them ever since and for the past few
years have been sales manager of the Chicago office.
In my occasional trips out of town I manage to see a good many
Princetonians and fortunately I go East on business two or three times
a year and usually spend a day or so at Princeton. I have taken in
the last four regular reunions and will surely take in all the others
from now on and hope to be there on off years as well.
Several 1903 men are pretty regular visitors to Chicago and John
Armstrong, Casey Paul and Robbie always look in on me. I hope
any others who may come through this city will do likewise and
delight my heart.
Greetings and good luck to you, Whitney, and to all the class.
Yours very sincerely,
H. G. Freeman.

Image of Katherine Linn, Helen Hinde and Marion Forgan, standing in the Bandbox, a store established by society women at 70 East Oak Street in the Near North Side community area of Chicago, Illinois. Forgan and Linn are tailoring a coat that Hinde is wearing, with Linn using a measuring tape. Proceeds from the store went to war relief efforts for Belgian and French children.

Marion’s sister was Ethel Forgan Booth, whose first husband died in World War I.

Per the Scottish American History Club, she remarried on December 26, 1929, to Philip Lyndon Dodge of New York City and after the wedding they lived at 111 East 88th Street.

Haven’t found much yet on her husband, but I wonder if he’s related to Esther Dodge somehow, who Charles Yoe Freeman had married.

But I did find a NY Times article from May 4 1919, New partnerships on the stock Exchange:

Halstead attended Lawrence School in Rockford, Illinois like his brother Charles.

The piano teacher at this school, Alex Zenier, had been involved with forming the Mendelssohn Club. The Mendelssohn Club is the oldest sustaining music club in the United States, and was founded October 4, 1884. It was the first choral society formed here for the study of oratorios, taking up such works as The Messiah, Creation, Elijah, Hymn of Praise, etc. Mr. Zenier finished his tenure, went to New York for a bit, then he returned in 1890 and opened a studio in Appleton on College Avenue. At the turn of the century, he instituted concerts (Artists’ Recitals), and Halstead G. Freeman was one of his backers in this endeavor.

Per the Daily Princetonian, on Thursday December 4, 1902, Halstead Gurnee Freeman (Senior Class), is listed as having been elected to the Class Day Committee. Halstead graduated Princeton in 1903.

Halstead was also involved in the famed Annual Dinner of the Chicago Princeton Club of May 12th 1909 where President Woodrow Wilson specially appeared. (see Charles Yoe Freeman)

Halstead and his new wife Marion came back from their honeymoon in time to be at the wedding of his brother John Edgar and Roxana Pomeroy on 26 February, 1916.

In 1917, Rockford, Illinois became an important military city. Camp Grant was opened south of the city, and thousands of soldiers were trained here for World War I.

The same year, Chase Securities Corporation was formed in order that the shareholders of the Chase Bank might be in a position to embrace opportunities that a banking institution cannot. It was formed in June, 1917, with a capital of $2,500.00. Shareholders were given the privilege of subscribing for stock of the new corporation, with a special dividend of 25 per cent on the then oustanding $10,000,000 capital stock of the Bank. Halstead is listed as a Vice-President at this time as well as in 1922.

Per the Evening Telegram New York Thursday March 8, 1921 – Mrs. Halstead G. Freeman is listed as being part of a committee in charge of the tea garden at the annual flower show, which opened March 11. This was a charitable event and the money raised was given to the Social Service Department of Bellevue Hospital. Other members of the committee were Mrs. Belmont Tiffany, Mrs. Linzee Blagden, Mrs. Coutlandt Nicoll, Mrs. John T. Prentice, Mrs. William T. Carrington, Mrs. Clarenco M. Woolley, Mrs. William F. Sheehan, Mrs. Frank L. Polk, Mrs. Egerton L. Winthrop, Mrs. Charles H. Sabin and Miss Ruth Morgan.

Railway Express

The same year that Halstead began working as VP for Chase Securities, 1917, (at the beginning of World War I), The American Railway Express Company was founded by the U.S. government when the nation’s major express carriers—Adams & Co., American Express Co., Wells, Fargo & Co., and Southern Express Co.—were merged into a public corporation. It was then the nation’s largest ground and air express services. A Federal administrator managed it. These three companies included the Adams Express Company, American Express Company and Southern Express Company and each owned a one-third stake in American Railway Express.

In 1920, governmental administration of the American Railway Express Company ended, and it continued as an operating company with it’s stock jointly held by Adams Express and American Express. American Railway Express then arranged contracts with almost every U. S. railroad (notable exception—the Southern Railroad, municipally owned) and acquired a virtual monopoly (95%,) of U. S. expressing. The contracts with the railroads included an option by which the railroads could purchase American Railway Express. These options expire Feb. 28, 1929. (TIME, Railway Express, Monday, Feb. 11, 1929)

This is the company that the American International Corporation would eventually be shuffled underneath where it would not be easily found.

Another company Halstead was involved with was Tide Water Associated Oil.

Tide Water Oil was founded in New York City in 1887. The company entered the gasoline market just before World War I, and by 1920 was selling gasoline, oil and other products on the East Coast under its Tydol brand.

Tide Water Associated Oil Company was incorporated in Delaware on March 5, 1926 – Shortly thereafter, through an exchange of stock, it acquired control of several companies: Associated Oil Company, Tide Water Oil Company, San Francisco and McKittrick Oil Company, and Tide Water Associated Oil Company of California.

Per TIME magazine, Monday, Mar. 15, 1926, Oil Merger:

Associated Oil and Tide Water Oil locked east and west coast oil production, transportation, refining and marketing into a tight $240,000,000 merger last week. The new company will be named the Tide Water Associated Oil Co.

Three weeks ago Blair & Co., Inc., and Chase Securities Corp. anticipated this merger by buying 300,000 shares (55%) of Associated Oil. They offered sellers $145,000,000 in cash or $165,000,000 in exchange securities (TIME, Feb. 15). Now to Tide Water shareholders they offer one and one-third shares of the new common for one share of the old. Preferred shares will exchange evenly.

Associated Oil ranks next to Standard Oil on the Pacific Coast. Tide Water Oil is formidable along the Atlantic, has large workings in the mid-continent field. Together they have the corporate right “to engage in the petroleum business generally, including the power to acquire securities of other companies.” The bankers will give no intimations of what concerns may be taken in.

The President of the new company will be Axtell J. Byles; directors: Henry W. de Forest of Manhattan, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Southern Pacific Co.; W. F. Humphrey of San Francisco, Director of Associated Oil Co.; Paul Shoup of San Francisco, President of Associated Oil Co.; Robert McKelvy of Manhattan, Vice President of Tide Water Oil Co.; Axtell J. Byles, President of Tide Water Oil Co.; E. L. Shea, Vice President of Tide Water Oil Co., and George White of Marietta, Ohio.

In February of 1927, Halstead and Elisha Walker were elected directors of the Tide Water Associated Oil Company. Financial Notes New York Times – February 18, 1927

[The first was Standard Oil of California reformed into a billion-and-a-half-dollar corporation in preparation for the absorption of other oil firms – TIME – February 8, 1926]

In the 1920’s Halstead joined the board of the American International Corporation. He was also a trustee for Northwestern Mutual Life from 1928 to 1934.

Per a Time magazine article from April 23, 1928, Sir Alfred Moritz Mond,chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd. announced the creation of the Finance Company of Great Britain & America Ltd. Chase Securities, which Halstead was the President of, and Imperial Chemical Industries are to own and sell equal amounts of the common stock.

The purpose of the company is to apply capital, which the Wiggin and Mond organizations gather, to commercial and industrial enterprises in the British Empire, Europe and the U. S. Said Sir Alfred, selecting his words meticulously: “The potentialities are very great indeed. The money behind us may be said to be limitless, but it will be only for good things. There are possibilities of further extension internationally. This group of financiers is not intended to be an octopus.”

The U.S. board of Directors were Mr. Wiggin, chairman, Sir Alfred Mond., Sir Harry McGowan, Matthew C. Brush, president and chairman of the executive committee of the American International Corp., Frederick Hudson Ecker, vice president Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., Archibald Robertson Graustein, president International Paper Co., J. Horace Harding, of Charles D. Barney & Co., John J. Raskob, vice president and chairman of the finance committee of General Motors Corp., Charles M. Schwab, chairman of the board of directors of the Bethlehem Steel Corp., William Hartman Woodin, president of American Car and Foundry Co., Halstead G. Freeman, president of Chase Securities Corp.

Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd had been formed in 1926 on December 7, and it was a major British corporation to amalgamate four major British chemical companies:

Brunner, Mond & Co. Ltd.,

Nobel Industries Ltd.,

United Alkali Company Ltd., and

British Dyestuffs Corporation Ltd.

Between World Wars I and II, ICI was a major competitor of Germany’s IG Farben, the cartel formed in 1925.

Formation of the Utility Equities Corporation under the laws of Delaware by the Chase Securities Corporation, Stone & Webster, Inc., and their associates will be announced today. Among the company’s purposes are the holding, buying and selling of securities of public utility and other companies in the United States and foreign countries.

Financing by the Chase Securities Corporation, Stone & Webster and Blodget, Inc., Brown Brothers & Co., the First National Corporation of Boston and Cassatt & Co., is expected this week in connection with the organization of the company. The offering will be, it is said, in the form of allotment certificates combining both priority and common stocks.

In December, Elisha Walker is made chairman and first partner of Blair & Company and purchased the Rockefeller interests in Prairie Oil & Gas and Prairie Pipe Line . – TIME magazine, December 10.

In December 1928, the eighty-six principal U.S. railroads, through a committee headed by President Storey of the Santa Fe, acquired control of American Railway Express by acquiring control of its holding companies, Adams and American Express. TIME – Business & Finance: Railway Express,Monday, Feb. 11, 1929

Per another Time magazine article of February 4 1929, in January the formation of the Petroleum Corporation of America, an oil securities company, was formally announced by Blair & Co. It’s executives were: Board Chairman Elisha Walker, first partner of Blair & Co. Other directors were Halstead G. Freeman, president of Chase Securities, Charles Hayden, of Hayden, Stone & Co., E. F. Hutton, chairman of Postum Co., Inc. It’s President is John H. Markham, Jr., head of the Exchange Bank of Tulsa, Okla., an independent oil operator. Petroleum Corp. will make its initial investments in Prairie Oil & Gas and Prairie Pipe Line.

“Black Tuesday”, October 29, 1929, when share prices on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) collapsed.

When the market crashed, Sinclair Consolidated acquired, mostly in the open market, large blocks of Petroleum Corporation stock. As the market declined, Petroleum Corporation bought large amounts of its own stock. Remember that Elisha Walker (head of Blair and Company) is a director in Sinclair Consolidated, and that both he and Halstead G. Freeman are the main honchos of Petroleum Corporation.

Also, per a news article from October 17, 2007, Petroleum Corporation was one of only five closed-end funds to have survived the stock market crash of 1929. A fact that could merit closer attention to this company and it’s directors, as I’ve seen it said that these economic “crashes” are historically proven as engineered. In 2007, Petroleum Corporation of America (now called Petroleum & Resources Corporation), passed the one billion dollar mark on October 10.

Also in early 1929 (the options to buy were due to expire Feb. 28) the eighty-six principal U.S. railroads formed a new monopoly company, Railway Express Agency, by purchasing the shares of American Railway Express Company held by Adams Express, American Express, and Wells Fargo.

TIME – Business & Finance: Railway Express,Monday, Feb. 11, 1929Among new financings of last week was an offering of $32,000,000 in bonds of Railway Express Agency, Inc. Such famed houses as J. P. Morgan & Co., Kuhn, Loeb & Co., First National Bank and National City Co. underwrote the issue. On March 1, subject to the approval of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the new organization will take over virtually the entire expressing business of the U. S. The bond issue culminates two years of effort on the part of U. S. railroad executives, particularly of William Benson Storey, president of the Santa Fe.

…After March 1, Adams, American and American Railway will be holding companies.

Railway Express Agency Inc., also formed alliances with three other investment companies: Haygart Corporation, American International Corporation and Petroleum Corporation of America. Haygart and American International were in time absorbed into the Company, while Petroleum Corporation of America became Petroleum & Resources Corporation.

To show what Halstead was mixed up in with the American International Corporation, some background information on this company:

The American International Corporation was formed in 1915 to fund the Russian Revolution (Bolshevik), and was the source of financing for German espionage and covert operations in the U.S. and South America during the World War I. Von Pavenstedt, the chief German espionage paymaster in the U.S., was senior partner of Amsinck & Co. G. Amsinck & Co., Inc. of New York was acquired by American International Corporation in November 1917. American International Corporation also wholly owned the Symington Forge Corporation, a major government contractor for shell forgings. Another business, American International Shipbuilding Corporation was wholly owned by AIC and signed substantial contracts for war vessels with the Emergency Fleet Corporation, it was the largest single recipient of contracts awarded by the U.S. government Emergency Fleet Corporation. Note: J. Ogden Armour was one of the primary board members of AIC (see Gurnee line)

I imagine that Halstead could possibly have been on AICs’ board earlier than the 20’s, since he was already VP in 1917.

President Wilson and the Secretary of Commerce approved the American International Corporation (AIC) formation, enabling the first order of business to establish a widespread distributorship throughout the world. It purchased the following companies:

Per the New York Times May 6, 1916, the American International Corporation acquired a controlling interest in United Fruit on May 5. United Fruit had extensive fruit plantations and selling agencies in South America.

AIC formed the Grace Russian Company with the Grace Corporation and extended the facilities of the AIC into Russia.

AIC controlled Midvale Steel Company

The China Corporation and the Siems-Carry Railroad were formed to handle both financing and construction within China.

In South America, the AIC purchased the Allied Construction Machinery Corporation, the Allied Sugar Machinery Corporation and the Latin American Corporation.

By the end of 1917, the AIC had established seventeen companies, all of which were involved with supplying American products to foreign countries.

By 1930, the American International Corporation had made huge profits for it’s original investors, had controlled approximately 177 companies worldwide, and had backed several revolutions. It had also taken control over several countries, and a large portion of the world’s wealth had founds it’s way into it’s hands. Obviously it was one of those few companies not affected by the stock market crash of October 1929.

The American International Corporation very quietly became a majority-owned subsidiary of The Adams Express Co., on December 31, 1945.

On January 1, 1970 the complete merger of AIC into Adams Express became effective and Adams succeeded to all the assets, rights, liabilities and obligations of AIC and the existence of AIC as a separate corporation ceased.

More information as to what else AIC was up to, as well as United Fruit and Glore,Forgan (which Halstead became a partner of with his brother-in-law) etc., is in the James Russell Forgan section of this Family Tree.

Halstead died in 1970, and I attended the funeral with my mother and her family. I have to say that the meeting some of those extremely wealthy people, and the house itself that we went to after the funeral, had to be one of the most creepy experiences I’ve ever had.

GOING BACK TO 1930 now, just after the stock market crash, here’s what else Halstead is involved with:

Between 1930 and 1933 more than 9,000 banks closed their doors, and domestic investment decreased by 90 percent.

And look who is cleaning up…

LONG RECORDS BACK NEW BANK’S HEADS—Wiggin Played National Role in the War—Aldrich a Lawyer—All Have Wide Training. NY Times March 19, 1930

Plain text:

The headship of the world’s greatest bank is the culmination of a career in which Albert H. Wiggin has shown ability not only in organization and administration, but also in meeting fiscal emergencies. The most recent example of the last capacity was the part that he played in the banking consortium that came to the rescue of the stock market in the October collapse.

Mr. Wiggin was described as “a tower of strength” in the consortium by a banker familiar with its operations. One member of the group suggested closing the Stock Exchange. This suggestion Mr. Wiggin vigorously opposed.

…When Mr. Wiggin joined the Chase National Bank as vice president in 1904 it had capital, surplus, and profits of about $4,000,000 and deposits of about $52,000,000. It was known in 1904, and it still is, as a banker’s bank, and as such, it is a correspondent and consultant to many out-of-town institutions. Mr. Wiggin expanded the business of the Chase to include important manufacturing, industrial and business acounts. In the first decade of his presidency he increased deposits from these fields from $26,000,000 to more than $300,000,000. With the Equitable Trust, the Chase led in financing post-war trae with Russia.

Mr. Wiggin became president of the Chase National Bank in 1911, succeeding A. Barton Hepburn. He became chairman of the board in 1918 and he was chairman of the board and president from 1921 to 1926. He has been chairman of the board since 1926. Until the Clayton act changed the law in respect to directorates he was a director and member of the executive committee of the Bankers Trust Company and of the Guaranty Trust Company, noth now known as “Morgan banks.” He was formerly also on the boards of the Astor Trust Company, Liberty National Bank and National Bank of Commerce, the latter now merged with the Guaranty.

…Winthrop W. Aldrich, who will become president of the Chase National Bank, is a lawyer.

…Mr. Aldrich is a son of Nelson W. Aldrich, who was United States Senator from Rhodes Island for many years, who served thereafter as chairman of the National Monetary Commission and who was recognized as a financial authority.He is a brother-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr.

I’m sure some people recognize that name Nelson W. Aldrich. That’s who J.P. Morgan met with to push through the Federal Reserve legislation in 1913. Which is the Forgans big area of involvement as well, and remember that Halstead is married to a daughter of the Forgan Brothers bankers.

NY Times – June 4, 1930 (Display Ad) Chase National merges with The Equitable Trust Company and the Interstate Trust Company

TIME – July 28, 1930 – Note: Elisha Walker is a Sinclair director—an important point.Harry Sinclair (Sinclair Consolidated Oil Corp) lately sold his half interest in Sinclair Oil Purchasing Co. and Sinclair Pipe Line Co. to Standard Oil Co. of Indiana, the other half-owner for $72,500,000; Sinclairs profit was $28,000,000.

NY Times – August 1, 1930 – Chase Bank to get Harris, Forbes group as Securities Unit. (that’s under Halstead as head of Chase Securities)The Chase Securities Corporation acquired the capital stock of the Harris, Forbes Corporations. Lloyd W. Smith was president of Harris, Forbes & Co., New York, and John R. Macomber was president of Harris, Forbes & Co. Inc. of Boston. It was founded in Chicago as N.W. Harris & Co. in 1882. In 1907, the Chicago house became the Harris Trust and Savings Bank. The eastern branches were acquired by Allen B. Forbes.

By early 1933, the publics’ hatred of banks and stockbrokers was so great that many predicted imminent revolution.

Those who would be kings – went TOO FAR. Again.

Congressional hearings in early 1933 revealed gross irresponsibility on the part of major banks, which had used billions of dollars of depositors’ funds to acquire stocks and bonds, and had made unsound loans to inflate the prices of these securities.

So on June 16, 1933 – The Banking Act of 1933 was passed by Congress despite much protest from the American banking community. This was also called the Glass-Steagall Act, after Representative Henry Steagall and Senator Carter Glass, and had been in the works well prior to Franklin Delano Roosevelt taking office as President of the United States and making it one his “platforms”. One of it’s principal points was that it prohibited commercial banks from using their own assets to invest in securities (such as stocks and bonds). This was meant to abolish flawed investment practices, such as those followed by the largest commercial banks in the 1920s, and discourage uncontrolled speculation such as that contributing to the stock market crash of 1929. Another important provision of the Banking Act of 1933 was the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance. The FDIC.

January 1934, The FDIC is inaugurated – 6 months later, all bank failures like the ones in the early years of the Great Depression, came to a halt.

NY Times May 5, 1934 – FIVE NEW DIRECTORS IN AMERICAN EXPRESS, Chase Bank’s Board Members Dropped to Conform to Law on Affiliates.Numerous changes are shown among the new directors of the American Express Company, affiliate of the Chase National Bank, who were elected several months ago to bring the board into conformity with the requirements of the Banking Act of 1933 with regard to the separation of banks from their affiliates. Several directors of the bank were dropped.

The new directors, whose names were made public yesterday, are F. Higginson Cabot Jr., John K. Livingston and Ralph T. Reed, officers of the express company; Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, who was named chairman of the board to succeed Winthrop W. Aldrich, and Henry Rogers Winthrop of the Stock Exchange firm of Winthrop. Mitchell & Co. Directors who were re-elected are Robert L. Clarkson, Charles Hayden, John McHugh, Harold I. Pratt and Frederick P. Small, president of the company.

Halstead is “retiring” his positions, and it looks like Allan Pope takes over from him.

Allan M. Pope was chairman of the First of Boston Corporation, which took over the securities division of Chase Harris Forbes (Chase Bank to Cut Ties With Two Units. New York Times, May 11, 1934.)

But then, his “retirement” doesn’t last very long, he’s back one year later! Plus the article below seems to not be aware he was active all the way until 1934. Odd, that. And this is where he partners up with James Russell Forgan, brother of his wife.

H.G. FREEMAN JOINS FIELD, GLORE & CO.; Former Head of Chase Securities to Be Partner, Returning to Wall St. From Retirement.

July 2, 1935, Tuesday

Changes in Field, Glore Co. which will take into that firm two men who were active in Wall Street a decade or more ago and had since retired, were announced yesterday. The new partners will be Halstead G. Freeman and Edward F. Hayes.

About CHASE NATIONAL BANK:

Note: None of the following was known by the average public until May 2004, when the CIA declassified thousands of documents from World War I and II time periods, due to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998.

The FBI, in November 1939, began tracing expenditures from the German consular account at Chase National. One find was that it made large payments to J.P. Morgan in a financial scheme to try and recoup Morgan’s losses on German debts . Another find was that money was being disbursed through Robert C. Mayer & Co. (one of the five permit holders in the ruckwanderer business). In April 1940, it was learned that this company had funnelled significant donations in small, untraceble five and ten-dollar bills to Father Charles Coughlin. There is an article that talks about him here.

In October 1940, the FBI learned of the whole rueckwanderer business (see rueckwanderer in book here), they then raided and siezed documents that proved that Chase National and the others (companies etc.) had clearly acted as agents of the German government without informing the Department of State, as was required by law. Prosecution for violations of the 1917 Espionage Act and the 1939 Foreign Agents Act were considered, as well as a conspiracy charge too. The Justice Department moved to prosecute in 1941, which clearly they could have won as Chase was DIRTY, big-time.

On June 9, 1942, Hoover was informed that after consultation with Mathias Correa, U.S. Attorney for the southern district of New York, the U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle (who had only been elected September 5, 1941), refused to prosecute Chase. Allegedly, what had happened was that Chase’s lead lawyer threatened to reveal FBI, Army, and Navy sources and methods in open court.

But Biddle? That can’t be a coincidence. He’s got to be a descendant of Nicholas Biddle, the dirty rat who tried to stop President Andrew Jackson from breaking the bankers choke-hold on the U.S. (1830’s I believe) So here is another Biddle allowing the criminal bankers to get off scot-free? That’s really something.

What’s even more interesting, is that Chase was doing a LOT worse stuff in 1940 than what the FBI found.

Per the JEWISH NEWS of Greater Phoenix, (Feb. 12, 1999) The Matteoli Commission, headed by Jean Matteoli, a concentration camp survivor and former Resistance fighter – singled out five U.S. banks, using their wartime names – J.P. Morgan, Chase Bank, Guarantee Trust, the Bank of the City of New York and American Express – among 400 mostly French financial institutions – that seized or sequestered Jewish accounts after the Nazis invaded France in 1940!!!

The Matteoli Commission evaluated the total amount of looted Jewish assets held by financial institutions at $900 million. The sum does not include the confiscation of businesses, real estate, furniture, jewels and paintings. Regarding furniture looted from Jewish homes, the commission said 44,000 train cars filled with the booty were taken to Germany during the war.

After the lawsuits were filed naming Barclays, J.P. Morgan and Chase Manhattan (among others), Barclays conducted an internal study and concluded that the Barclays office in wartime France had 343 Jewish customers and approximately 95 percent of them survived the war and were presumed to have participated in the postwar restitution process. Barclays then broke loose from the other banks and made it’s own settlement agreement with the claimants for 3.6 million dollars. Swiss Banks, had been previously forced to settle due to incredible pressure brought to bear on them to take responsibility for sheltering stolen funds. This settlement, August 1998, established a precedent. So next , after Barclays, J.P. Morgan also settled quickly. Chase Manhattan Bank tried to hold out. That’s because Chase, out of the 3, in my opinion, was probably the dirtiest as far as stealing and profiting from Jewish deaths went.

Carlos Niedermann, the manager of the one branch of Chase Manhattan allowed to stay open in Paris, by the Nazis, wrote to the board in the U.S., and mentioned he had good relations with the Nazis. He urged that his branch continue doing business by taking advantage of the financial opportunities provided by Nazi rule. This was approved, and German accounts were opened, and Niedermann approved loans to finance heads of German industries that were assisting the Nazi war machine. He was not a “rogue employee” just acting on his own without telling anyone. The Federal Reserve issued a report in April of 1945 after it investigated Chase’s Paris branch (which is a bit like the fox investigating the chicken house), and the report concluded that the U.S. heads of Chase were well aware of what was going on in Paris. Of course, noone was CHARGED with a CRIME. And that was my point about the fox and chickens. A report by the U.S. Treasury Department concluded the same thing – Chase U.S. KNEW.

J.P. Morgan’s Paris office boasted of it’s anti-Semitic hiring policies and the fact that none of J.P. Morgan’s partners was a Jew. The Nazis gave the bank its seal of approval by designating it “an international Aryan organization.”

That’s really sick, considering J.P. Morgan’s Rothschild connection that is discussed in an articles series called Sinking Titanic, here.

Both Chase and J.P. Morgan tried to claim during the litigation that they “had no control” over the offices and couldn’t do anything to stop them, yada yada. Liars. Media pressure began, and J.P. Morgan folded.

On August 31, 2000, Judge Sterling Johnson, presiding over the French banks’ class action litigation, denied the banks’ motion to dismiss the lawsuits. What makes Judge Johnson’s decision really amazing is that he was going to grant the plaintiffs the most dreaded of tools to use against the French banks: legal discovery. This forces parties to disclose to their opponents not only all documents and records relecant to the lawsuit but also anything that may lead to the discovery of such relevant documents and records. This means the plaintiff’s lawyers would be able to go through the French banks’ private files anywhere in the world, to find any undisclosed “dirty laundry” and expose it to the world. No other holocaust-era lawsuit had been able to reach that stage of litigation! What a precedent!

Unfortunately, as is often the case with our so-called justice system, the real loser here is the truth. Because the men back of this kind of monstrous behavior would do anything rather than have their secrets revealed, so within a month? All the French banks settled.

Was justice served? I wonder if the holocaust survivors really understand the value of all that hidden dirty laundry – would they rather REALLY tear these guys down or just have some money. Call me unconventional, but that bothers me that the choice was that the truth stays hidden over $$. And, the settlement terms were VERY unfair. You can read more about this in the book Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America’s Courts By Michael J. Bazyler, which details many of the Intelligence Documents that were declassified in 1998. See here.

Iinterestingly enough shortly after all this J.P Morgan and Chase merged in 2002, forming an even bigger conglomerate.

Additional items re: the Halstead branch:

In 1947, per the New York Times engagement announcement of his son David Forgan Freeman to Hazel Sims, Halstead Gurnee Freeman and wife have a quite tony address listed in this same New York Times announcement – 1120 Park Avenue. To give you an idea how tony – in 2009 the average apartment size is 5 bedroom and average selling price is $8,450,000. !!!

1120 Park Avenue

It is a neo-Georgian-style apartment building designed by George F. Pelham and erected in 1929. It has 68 apartments and was converted to a cooperative in 1961.

Apparently, the Freemans had previously lived at 1130 Park Avenue, as per The Blue Book of New York City, 1930.

And by 1957, when Marion Forgan Freeman, Halstead’s wife died at the age of 69, their address is listed as 1192 Park Avenue. (ref NY Times obit)

Halstead’s father-in-law David Robertson Forgan

David Robertson Forgan, was vice chairman of the executive committee of the Central Republic Bank and Trust Company of Chicago. He was born in Scotland in 1862. His father founded Robert Forgan & Son to manufacture golf balls and cluibs. When he was 15, he and several other boys applied for a job at the Clydesdale Bank in St. Andrews, where his Sunday school teacher was an official of the bank. He got a position at the Bank of Nova Scotia three years later, and held positions in Winnipeg and Fredericton, N.B. In 1888, he became cashier of the American Exchange Bank in Duluth, Minn., and two years later went to the Northwestern National in Minneapolis. In 1896, he came to Chicago as a vice president of the Union National Bank and was made president two years later. It 1900 it merged with the First National, where his brother, James B. Forgan, was president. He became its president from 1907 to 1925, when it merged with the National Bank of the Republic, of which he became vice chairman, and continued after it merged with the Central Trust to become the Central Republic Bank and Trust. “He was a close friend of the late President William Howard Taft and General Charles G. Dawes, American Ambassador to London.” His sons, Robert R. Forgan, David Robertson Forgan Jr., and J. Russell Forgan, and daughters Mrs. Halstead G. Freeman and Mrs. P. Lyndon Dodge [Skull & Bones 1907] all lived in New York City.

In 1912, David Robertson Forgan was involved with Alexander Edward Duncan and his formation of Commercial Credit. This was the company formed to offer credit to the mass public for the first time, in order to get them to by cars from Chrysler etc. David was a director in this company.

“Chairman of Commercial Credit is Alexander Edward Duncan, 53, canny Kentuckian of Scotch descent. With only a high-school education he started his first credit company in 1907, organized Commercial Credit in 1912 with $300,000 capital. He foresaw the motorcar as a great opportunity and his company now has 62% of its business in that field. Chief of his motor customers is Chrysler Corp. He likes fishing and horse-races, is more of a home man than a clubfellow. He lives in Baltimore where the company began, still maintains its home office although it is represented in 191 cities. The directorate over which he presides includes James Bruce, president of Baltimore Trust Co. and brother of David K. Este Bruce, Secretary Mellon’s son-in-law; Waddill Catchings; Ambassador to Japan William Cameron Forbes; Banker David R. Forgan of Chicago; Drugman Louis K. Liggett of Boston; Howard LaVerne Wynegar, president of the company. Last week quiet President Wynegar saw no reason why the installment business should not continue prosperous.Said he: “People who have analyzed the relation of finance companies to general business will see how largely they have contributed to lessen the Depression. They have made available larger amounts of consumer credit to support industry operating on the mass production basis. Mass production calls for mass credit.”

Time Magazine, Mass Credit, Monday August 31, 1931

Informal portrait of David Robertson Forgan, banker, sitting at a desk in a room during the O’Hara Senate Welfare Commission in Chicago, Illinois. 1913 – June 6.

James Berwick Forgan 1852-1924

The Federal Reserve Act was passed in 1913, and David’s brother James B. Forgan was elected First President of the Federal Advisory Council of the Federal. He served for six years as president of the Federal Advisory Council.

Group portrait of bankers seated in rows in a room in Chicago, Illinois. The bankers were attending a Federal Reserve meeting. – June 19, 1914

David R. Forgan, Harry Lauder, and Charles W. Folds riding in back seat of automobile – Chicago Daily News, Inc., 1918 (David is on the far left side of the seat.)

David Robertson Forgan died in 1931 on 27 December.

James Russell Forgan – Halstead’s wife Marion’s brother

James Russell Forgan graduated Princeton in 1922. The Forgan Freemans were involved in the Tobacco Companies. In January 1929, Tobacco and Allied Stocks, Inc. was formed by Joseph F. Cullman Jr. and Howard S. Cullman, of Cullman Brothers Inc., and others. It was formed, per the New York Times, “to invest and trade in securities of companies engaged in the tobacco and allied industries.” One of the organizers of this new company (who would also be Directors), was J. Taylor Foster of Field, Glore & Co.

James Russell Forgan became a partner of Field, Glore & Co. shortly thereafter in 1930. Halstead Gurnee Freeman, his brother-in-law, came out of retirement in 1935 to be a partner with him at the New York Office around this time.

Field as in Marshall Field, who Charles Yoe Freeman is involved with.

Field, Glore became Glore, Forgan in January 1937. It later became Glore, Forgan, Wm. R. Staats, Inc. then became du Pont, Glore Forgan Inc. after merging in 1970 with Francis I. DuPont & Co. and Hirsch & Co. James Russell Forgan also worked with William J. Casey (an OSS buddy), who later became Glore, Forgan’s house counsel.

In 1963 Maurice Stans became a partner in William R. Staats & Company, which then merged in 1965 with Glore Forgan. After Nixon’s election in 1968, William Casey contacted Forgan and asked him “to write to Nixon’s finance man, Maurice Stans”. In 1971, William Casey was then offered the job as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In 1969, most of the board members of Tropical Gas Co., Inc.(South America) had connections to Glore Forgan. This is an oil company and for perspective, I read somewhere an interesting point, which is that the United States imports more oil from Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador – than from all Persian Gulf countries combined. A merger occurred with Penn Central, and the advisor for Penn Central was the investment bank of Glore Forgan, Wm. R. Staats, Inc. The conflict of interest here should be rather obvious.

James Russell Forgan was also a director of Italian Superpower, and his firm Glore, Forgan created the Eurofund, the first investment fund of its kind to buy up holdings in European corporations.

Interestingly, due to the fact that AIC gets completely dissolved into Adams Express on 1 January 1970, since of course AIC had a controlling interest in United Fruit it makes sense that United Fruit is also “moved” and indeed also in 1970, United Fruit is merged with AMK Corp (John Morrel and Co meatpackers) into a new company called United Brands Company, which most people know as Chiquita Brands International, Inc.

I think that’s called a corporate shuffle.

World War II (1939 to 1945)

On June 13, 1942, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for the branches of the United States military. It was the American version of the British Secret Intelligence Service and Special Operations Executive. By the time it was dissolved on September 20, 1945, the OSS had an estimated 30,000 employees.

Due to the uncoordinated activities of the different Military Intelligence Divisions, President Franklin D. Roosevelt conferred with Canadian/British spymaster William Stephenson, who was the senior British intelligence officer in the western hemisphere, and as a result of these meetings Roosevelt requested that William (Wild Bill) Joseph Donovan, draft a plan for an intelligence service. His task was to evaluate the global military position. He submitted his suggestions as “Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information,” which was approved, and he was then appointed as the “Co-ordinator of Information” in July 1941.

Donovan set up the COI headquarters in Room 3603 of Rockefeller Center in October, 1941 and asked Allen Dulles to head it. As a side note, the offices where Donovan had located his headquarters had been the location of the operations of Britain’s MI6.

Donavan and Dulles then recruited James Russell Forgan to head up the European division of the Office of Strategic Services. James also had a professional relationship from 1943 to 1945 with Brigadier General John Magruder, DeputyDirector for Intelligence. Magruder had been the Chief of Intelligence Division, War Department from 1938-41, so it’s easy to see why he was brought on board into the OSS. Magruder died in 1958.

Per the cia.gov declassified records:

In September 1942, the OSS had established the Secret Intelligence Branch to organize clandestine agent operations abroad. William J. Casey (James’s friend) was posted as director of its London office in June 1944. Casey was given full responsibility for organizing the penetration of Nazi Germany by OSS agents. The London office, located at 72 Grosvenor Street in the Mayfair section, expanded quickly and became the focal point of Anglo-American intelligence cooperation in the war against Germany. As one historian noted, “the London mission was at the heart of OSS relations with British intelligence, and as such it personified the essence of that connection in the Allied war effort.”

After the War ended in 1945, the 33rd President Harry S. Truman signed an Executive Order which split the functions of the OSS between the Department of State and the Department of War. The War Department took over the Secret Intelligence (SI) and Counter-espionage (X-2) Branches, which were then housed in a new office created for just this purpose—the Strategic Services Unit (SSU). The Secretary of War appointed Magruder as the director to oversee the liquidation of the OSS, and more importantly, the preservation of the clandestine intelligence capability of the OSS.

James Russell Forgan was then tasked by Donovan (through Magruder) to spear-head the planning for the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, and was Chairman of the two committees formed to accomplish this.

I don’t yet have any information as to in what capacity James continued his Intelligence relationships but I do know that as a result of James’s work, in January of 1946, President Truman created the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) which was the direct precursor to the CIA. The assets of the above-mentioned SSU (which after James’ and Magruder’ work had become a streamlined “nucleus” of clandestine intelligence) were then transferred to the CIG in mid-1946 and then re-named the Office of Special Operations (OSO). Next, the National Security Act of 1947 established the Central Intelligence Agency. The paramilitary component of the OSS became the Special Activities Division of the CIA. Allen Dulles would later be the 5th director of the CIA.

In 1945, 2 days after the OSS was disbanded, Donovan and William Stephenson (see formation of the OSS above) registered a corporation in Panama called the British American Canadian Corporation S.A. On April 2, 1947, this corporation changed its name to the World Commerce Corporation, with its head office being located in New York City.The most interesting thing to me about this corporation was that with apparently only one exception, ALL of its directors and almost everyone associated with it were connected to British or American intelligence personnel one way or another whether former agents or handlers. James Russell Forgan, of course, being a top intelligence “handler” of agents, was also on the board. He, along with Donovan and Stephenson, simply rolled over previous Intelligence activities into a front corporation. Former OSS and MI6 officers were then placed by this company as representatives in 47 countries. For James Bond afficianados, the World Commerce Corporation is the real world pattern for the fictional firm Universal Export, which provided a corporate cover for James Bond.

Donovan did not officially show himself in relationship to this corporation until he became a director on October 23, 1947. Donovan’s law firm however, (along with Allen Dulles who was also a lawyer) acted as legal advisors from the beginning, advisors which also included Otto Doering apparently. Other intelligence personnel of note that came on board were Lester Armour, (see Gurnee branch of my family tree – J. Ogden Armour), and Nelson Rockefeller, formerly in charge of South American intelligence during the War. In 1962 the World Commerce Corporation was liquidated for tax reasons.

Sworn testimony before the US Senate indicates that during World War II an “organization” did exist which was “formed by Lord Shaw­cross of Eng­land and Mr. Her­mann Abs of Ger­many to bring about a Magna Carta for the pro­tec­tion of for­eign invest­ments of World War II.” The same Lord Shawcross led a campaign in recent times aimed at preventing the British House of Lords from re-opening the war crimes inves­ti­ga­tions in Britain.

It’s been said that this organization helped protect certain financial interests exclusively and ergo aiding in laundering money siezed by the Nazis during the war, to Argentina, Nelson Rockefeller’s territory during the war. According to US Treasury Agent reports, in 1941, (when the U.S. entered the War), all of the branches of Amer­i­can banks in France under Ger­man con­trol were closed, except two. The two banks had direct ties to Dr. Hermann Josef Abs of Deutsche Bank, the then financial advisor to Hitler’s government. Those two banks were: Mor­gan et Cie (which was a Rothschild concern), and Chase of New York which the Forgans and Halstead Freeman were involved with. (as detailed elsewhere in this Family Tree history).

The reason the above is mentioned is because accord­ing to Nurem­berg records, Hermann Abs’s Deutsche Bank was the main con­duit for laun­der­ing Nazi money into Argentina which was done under the super­vi­sion of Mar­tin Bor­mann. Despite this blatant complicity, the Amer­i­can side of the war crimes inves­ti­ga­tion of Abs was dropped and as I understand it Abs was appointed eco­nomic adviser for the British zone of Ger­many, which is where we end up back at the World Commerce Corporation again.

So what we have here is that during World War II, assets were re-appropriated by various world bankers and laundered into Argentina through Deutsche Bank and presumably Chase and Morgan concerns with Nelson Rockefeller mixed up in the middle of it all. Then after the war, the same money, (stolen from many Jews and others) was routed through organizations such as the World Commerce Corporation who then fostered loans for the so-called German economic revival in the 1950’s!. Allen Dulles, attorney for the World Commerce Corporation, had an assis­tant named Frank Wis­ner who was the State Department’s deputy for Cur­rency and Eco­nomic Reform in the Amer­i­can zone of West Ger­many. In a strange coicidence, one of the biggest trade areas controlled by the World Commerce Corporation is also the new home of the fleeing Nazis, especially the monsters such as Mengele who did such horrible things to the Jewish people during the War.

Another terrible blot on human history that my ancestors aided-and-abetted while reaping profits from, is what happened in Guatemala. I would like to tell that story now. Do remember the family ties to United Fruit, American International Corporation, Tobacco companies, Glore,Forgan and the World Commerce Corporation.

guatemala

In Guatemala, between 1945 and 1954 there was a period referred to as the “10 Years of Springtime” that started with the election of Juan Jose Arevalo to the presidency.

Between 1945 and 1951 he established the nation’s social security and health systems and a government bureau to look after Mayan concerns. Many coups were attempted against him but they were not successful.

His successor was Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán and at the time, 2% of landowners owned 70% of the arable land and farm laborers were kept in debt slavery by these landowners. Arbenz implemented an agrarian reform law to break up the large estates and foster individually owned small farms. This involved redistribution of 160,000 acres of uncultivated land owned by United Fruit Company, which was compensated for its land. The government also began competing with United Fruit in the production and export of bananas.

Understand that the role of United Fruit at this time, was literally a state within a state. It not only owned all of Guatemala’s banana production and monopolized banana exports, it also owned the country’s telephone and telegraph system, and almost all of the railroad track.

In October 1951, Arbenz had his first less than friendly encounter with United Fruit. United Fruit had sent a stuck-up Boston executive official to the presidential palace with a series of dictates such as: current contracts would be extended; taxes would not be raised. Arbenz basically told them to “shove it”, and then made some demands of his own. He asked for payment of export duties; he asked that the company offer fair prices for land it acquired; he asked that United Fruit obey the Guatemalan constitution.

In 1952 he issued Decree 900.

The law would redistribute land to local peasants; it allowed the government to confiscate any farm over 223 acres, with a key condition: The land had to be unused. The new rule mandated that the former landholders receive compensation based on the declared worth of the confiscated territory. According to the formula, United Fruit was to receive $600,000. When the company protested that the sum was just a fraction of the true value of its holdings, which was true, Arbenz countered that the amount was based on tax returns submitted by the banana company itself. The company had been cheating on its taxes, and Guatemalan authorities simply chose to take United Fruit at its word.

Well that did it, Sam Zemurray got on the horn to Edward L. Bernays and hired him to “handle” this situation.

Edward Bernays is considered by many to be “the father of public relations.” He was Sigmund Freud’s nephew and considered that he had perfected the modern art of information management. He authored scientific papers on how to do this and how public opinion could thereby be manipulated. In his 1928 book, Propaganda, Bernays laid out his methods for accomplishing this: “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?” His favorite method was NOT to attempt to influence the “masses” directly but to engineer consent by finding an already existing group of leaders, change their opinions and let them do what he wanted in the first place. Failing this, he hired, managed and tightly controlled a “group of leaders” and did it that way.

Bernays recommended a particularly aggressive campaign to handle Arbenz, and Zemurray agreed. The alliance was launched.

The goal was to convince high-ranking Americans that Arbenz was a communist. Bernays flew journalists to Guatemala, throwing money at them like it was water on “fact-finding” missions. Dozens of articles then began appearing over the next two years in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Miami Herald, and in local papers across the United States – that portrayed the rulers of the Central American country as a dangerous threat. Bernays also planted stories that implied that Russia was training Latin American revolutionaries somewhere behind the Iron Curtain.

Arbenz didn’t back off.

Now things get serious, The Dulles brothers, the Forgan/Halstead fund managers and others get involved and begin pressuring Eisenhower.

Bear in mind that Eisenhower’s personal secretary was married to the head of United Fruit’s Public Relations Department – which of course is a direct tie to Bernays. John Foster Dulles was the Secretary of State at this time, and his brother Allen Dulles (James Russell Forgan’s old OSS junior) was the Director of the CIA (1953-1961) Allen, is also a primary United Fruit shareholder, as was Forgan, through the American International Corporation which was being shielded underneath Adams Express. Short refresher is that AIC became the largest shareholder of United Fruit in 1916, and AIC became a subsidiary of Adams Express December 31, 1945, which became a closed fund.

John Foster Dulles applied Bernays plan of accusing Guatemala of being communist because of their “extreme nationalism”.

So, beginning in mid-1953, Eisenhower had the US State Department demand the actual value of the land, about $16 million, to Arbenz. It was refused. Eisenhower then has Guatamala labeled “communist” and started providing US aid.The CIA sent an army and planes, bombed a military base and a government radio station. A Naval blockade was instituted, and in the Honduras, Intel operatives set up a training camp for their puppet replacement choice Armas. Four Hundred fighters were sent from the U.S. to Central America, under the cover of a United Fruit cargo vessel.

The CIA then conducted Pyschological warfare operations in concert with Bernays. A radio station called La Voz de la Revolucion featured music, comedies, and propaganda from “deep in the jungle,” according to its broadcasts but it was actually being beamed from Miami – using United Fruits’ tropical radio network. Fake obituaries claiming that Arbenz had committed suicide were published in United Fruit controlled newspapers. Rebel planes flew low over the capital. It worked. The Guatemalan army numbered nearly five thousand men and on the night of June 18, “thousands” of soldiers and citizens were joining the just a few hundred so-called “liberators” as they marched toward Guatemala City.

On June 27, 1954, Arbenz resigned but that wasn’t good enough. The moneymen wanted to publicly degrade and humiliate him so he was taken to the airport, stripped to his underwear and paraded before the press before he was allowed to board the plane to Mexico.

This disgusting display of vicious bullying by scared little men who only care about their money, resulted in a restoration of the stranglehold on the Guatemalan economy. The poor, illiterate Guatemalan peasants were made to pay now, in hunger and torture for supporting land reform, and for trying to attain a better future for themselves and their families in their own country.

Colonel Castillo Armas was installed by the CIA and became the new president.

The US Ambassador furnished Armas with lists of radical opponents to be eliminated, and the Guatamalan bloodbath began. Thousands were arrested. Many people were tortured and killed. United Fruit got all its land back and to punish the people further for daring to support Arbenz, the Banana Worker’s Union was banned. Terrible working conditions and slave labor were back. To try and prevent this from happening again, Armas cut out one-third of the voters by barring illiterates from voting. He outlawed all political parties, labor confederations, and peasant organizations. He closed down opposition newspapers and burned “subversive” books.

And there, in the middle of all this bloody fanaticism over money and power, are James Russell Forgan and Halstead Gurnee Freeman.

As a brief recounting of just what was engendered here, this era marked the beginning of a long and bloody punishment that on up to recent times, Guatemala still has the worst record of human rights abuses in Latin America.

The repressive military dictatorship of the Armas regime was followed by a succession of one CIA puppet dictator after another. The protest and repression became more violent, civil war emerged. And even though Guatemala was industrialized in the 60’s and 70’s, the rich just got richer and the cities became cesspools. The military continued its violent suppression of anti-government elements, but a Mayan guerrilla army began to form.

To counter-act the Mayans, during the Johnson presidency, the Green Berets were sent to Guatemala to transform its Army into a modern counter-insurgency force and to conduct a Vietnam-style war. That is the origin of what is referred to as the “killing machine” that still operates in Guatemala today.

Death squads were started during this period. The squads had lists of people that were “suspected communists”, or who opposed the existing system. They were hunted down and killed.

The moneymen wanted still more, so they prodded the military to take measures to establish a US base for counterinsurgency (counter-revolutionary) actions, in order to maintain cheap labor for the landowners and US corporations, and to “preserve the System”. Terror was their preferred weapon, and the CIA was the one to make it happen.

The police, the army, and the death squads, were all armed and trained by the CIA.

Guerrillas, peasants, students, labor leaders, and professional persons were jailed by the thousands by the Guatemalan military. And thousands more, just trying to live and overcome their poverty and the massive injustices occurring – simply “disappeared.”

Journalists, lawyers, teachers, members of opposition parties, and anyone who expressed sympathy for the anti-government cause were simply machine-gunned down

If ANYone tried to improve the peasants situation, they were subjected to torture, mutilation, and death.

So, by the end of 1968, the guerrillas had been wiped out.

But still it did not end. The CIA had links with a Guatemalan Army unit, the G2, that maintained a network of torture centers and body dump sites throughout Guatemala and has killed thousands. G2 – a group of 2,000 elite Guatemalan Army Intelligence officers.

Operating out of the US Embassy, CIA undercover agents, secretly working with the G-2 have trained, advised, armed, and equipped these officers to do their viciously barbaric crimes.

In the 80’s General Efrain Rios Montt, a graduate of the School of the Americas (SOA), at Fort Benning, Georgia, came to power in a 1982 coup. He was PR’ed as a “born-again” Christian reformer but what he really was, was one of the most savage of Guatemalan dictators – and that’s saying something. During the 17 months of Rios Montt’s “Christian” campaign, 400 villages were destroyed, 10 – 20,000 Indians were killed, and over 100,000 fled to Mexico.

In 1995, US policy toward Guatemala was driven by the unprecedented public attention to the plight of US citizen Jennifer Harbury, the wife of disappeared guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca. In 1992, Bamaca was captured and murdered. His wife Jennifer (who was an attorney), waged an impassioned campaign to find her husband and bring his killers to justice. The scandal revealed a secret policy that for many years had made all but irrelevant Washington’s public postures on human rights in Guatemala. In the cascade of revelations, it became clear the CIA had secretly provided millions of dollars in assistance to Guatemala’s G-2 unit, even after the US government cut-off overt military aid and sales in 1990.

The revelation by Jennifer Harbury of the ClA’s complicity in the deaths of her husband and the US citizen Michael DeVine has led to a campaign to declassify documents held by US security and intelligence agencies.

I would like to see those.

David Forgan Freeman – son of Halstead Gurnee Freeman and Marion Forgan Freeman

Grandpa’s cousin David

Grandpa’s cousin David died July 4, 2004. He prepared at St. Marks School and followed the Freeman family tradition of attending Princeton. He majored in economics, and graduated with honors in the School of Public and International Affairs in 1940. He served in the Navy in 1941 with assignments in Europe and the Pacific. He reached the rank of lieutenant commander and was awarded the Legion of Merit. He then earned a law degree from Yale Law School in 1947. Following that, he became an executive with the Fund for the Republic, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (1968), and was executive director of the Scherman Foundation in New York from 1979 to 1993. Also in 1968, he became president of the Council on Foundations. Grandpa’s cousin David was a a trustee of Lingnan University in Hong Kong, and was director of the Oceanic Free Library.

His wife was named Hazel Sims, and per the New York Times they became engaged June 16, 1947. At this time, Halstead Gurnee Freeman and wife have a quite tony address listed in this same New York Times announcement – 1120 Park Avenue. (see Halstead)

His obituary also states that he is survived by his five children: David Jr., Sims, Marion, John, and Francis.

Per the New York Times, Marion married G. Corson Ellis III. , in May of 1986. There is a Corson at that time was president of Kessler-Ellis Products, a manufacturer of industrial electronic controls in Atlantic Highlands, of which his father is the founder and chairman.

Corson Ellis Jr., (his father presumably) was Yale Skull & Bones Society member 1951. Corson was listed as being on the Board of Directors of a Montana company called Crisafulli, per their website.

Corson is not a fan of the Patriot Act I presume, because there is a letter to the Press Herald where he writes:

The Bush administration’s policy of electronically eavesdropping on people in the United States is frightening, almost as scary as our general tolerance of it.

Gaining a warrant to place a wiretap or to monitor electronic communications is easy.

But President Bush wants to have unmonitored, unrestricted power to monitor all communications of U.S. citizens and be accountable to nobody – not Congress and not the judiciary.

I hope we are going to wake up before it’s too late.

Our right to privacy is in danger.

Gaining warrants to intrude on our communications will not slow down the fight against terror.

I pray that people will wake up and realize what is happening before it is too late.

Corson Ellis

Freeport

In 2006, Concord Academy, where my cousin Marion graduated in 1969, celebrated Marion’s induction as a new life trustee. Queen Noor of Jordan, (a Concord classmate of hers), attended this function in honor of Marion. Marion and Queen Noor were also classmates at Princeton University.

In 2004, Queen Noor wrote a book called Leap of Faith . In it she writes:

“It was on a whim that I applied to Princeton University in my senior year at Concord. For years I had planned to return to the West Coast for university, and I particularly loved the campus at Stanford University. Princeton was debating opening its doors to women for the first time in its 222-year history and had indicated they might consider applications for the class of 1973. My college adviser was very enthusiastic and urged me to apply. I did, for a lark; I was going to Stanford if they accepted me. Princeton, traditional and conservative, did not fit my notion of an ideal university, especially during this period of social change and political turmoil.

In the hot competition for places at top-rated universities I did not feel particularly distinguished, although I had good test scores, played several varsity sports, and was captain of my field hockey team. Compared to my talented classmates I was unremarkable, so when my letter of acceptance arrived from Stanford, I was thrilled. I was also one of 150 women, along with my good friend and classmate Marion Freeman, whom Princeton accepted for its historic first coed class. I was suddenly torn. Part of me was drawn to the unprecedented Princeton challenge, but I was also longing to return to California. I agonized until the last minute of the deadline for postmarking our replies. I stood at a mailbox on a deserted New York City street weighing my options and finally mailed my acceptance to New Jersey, thinking I could always transfer after two experimental years.

That fall, Princeton’s first class of women arrived on campus with little sense of what to expect. We found ourselves isolated in a dormitory, Pyne Hall, on the edge of the campus. We were definitely in an awkward situation, one woman to every twenty-two men, males whose previous experience with women on campus was as weekend attractions. We were not dates; we were not made up; we were just going to class at eight in the morning.

Marion and I would room next to each other during our sophomore year and become very close friends. We remain so to this day.”

Charles Yoe Freeman (Sr.) was born March 29, 1877, in Lockport, N.Y., and died May 7, 1964 in Arizona. He was a lawyer and a banker. He was a graduate of Denver High School in 1894; Lawrenceville School (Rockford, Illinois) in 1895, then A.B. at Princeton in 1899, and then received his Bachelor of Laws degree from Northwestern University in 1902. He married Sarah Esther Dodge, at Chestnut Hill Philadelphia, on April 30th, 1905. They first lived at 514 North Avenue East, Chicago. They had 2 sons. Charles Yoe Freeman Jr., and H. Dodge Freeman. By the time of his death, he had four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Sarah Esthers’ family was not very easy to track down, but I did find the following:

Her father was Henry Henley Dodge (Francis,” Francis,^’ Robert,^ Isaac,* Bobert,^ William,- William^), b. 13 April, 1835, in Georgetown. He and his brother, Francis, engaged in flour shipment with the vessels used by the firm of F. & A. H. Dodge, Henry remaining in Georgetown and Francis being located in New York City. Francis, having died in Georgetown, 22 May, 1865, Henry changed his business. He owned and operated a stone quarry at Seneca, Md. In 1875 he was president of the Potomac Lock and Dock Company, and originated and perfected a plan, which was carried out under his direction, for passing canal boats by means of a caisson on an inclined plane, between the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal and the Potomac river above (Georgetown, where the difference of level between the canal and river is thirty- six feet and subject to considerable variation. His invention antedated the famous elevators of Fontinettes, on the canal from Aire to St. Omer, France, where caissons carrying boats are raised and lowered vertically about the same amount. Henry was married on30 April 1874, to Ysidora Beatrice Moorehead of Philadelphia, by Rt. Rev. Bishop William Bacon Stevens of Pennsylvania, assisted by Rev. Mr. Paddock. Resides 30(?)1 Dumbarton Avenue, Georgetown, D. C. Children:
i. William Moorhead Chapman Dodge, b. 23 July, 1875
ii. Francis Henley Dodge, b. 28 Sept., 1876ill. Sarah Esther Dodge, July 19, 1879
iv. Henry Henley Dodge, Jr., b. 18 Nov., 1885
V. Donald Davidson Dodge, b. 12 March, 1889

Per the Washington Law Reporter Vol. XXXVI – 1908 Sarah’s family was involved in some sort of probate dispute, and I think this was the second time (the first being her oldest brother, William M.C. Dodge trying to challenge the will of his father that left the money to his mother).

Back to Charles Yoe –

In 1906 he was the Vice President of the Metropolitan Surety Company.

To illustrate the pull and “circle of friends” of Charles Yoe and his brother Halstead – in 1910, the Annual Dinner of the Princeton Club of Chicago was held on May 12th, and they had President Woodrow Wilson as the guest of honor and principal speaker. Charles, as Vice-President, had to be involved with arranging President Wilson’s visit (probably along with his brother Halstead).

The President went to Chicago especially for the occasion. Prior to the dinner, they foregathered at the new home of the University Club of Chicago, which was considered at that time to be one of the handsomest clubhouses between the two oceans. The Annual Dinner itself was held in the large dining room.

The President of the club, Harold F. McCormick was not available so Charles Yoe Freeman, Vice-President presided, and at this head table were President Wilson, Cyrus H. McCormick (princeton grad 1879), William McIlvaine (1885) etc.

Halstead Gurnee Freeman also attended this Dinner, and played a part in a skit put on after the dinner, entitled “The Mystery Solved, or Much Ado About the Present”. President Wilson then delivered a speech.
Ref: The Princeton Alumni Weekly, Vol. X, No. 32, Wednesday, May 18, 1910

The first law firm Charles Yoe was made a partner with, (as of 1911) was Sheriff, Dent, Dobyns & Freeman. His residence at this time was 17 Scott St. Chicago, Illinois.

However, another source has him listed as living at 5350 Drexel Avenue in 1911, so perhaps he moved that year.

Interestingly, in this same year Cyrus McCormick, Gordon McCormick, Halstead Gurnee Freeman, Rev. and Mrs. John Newton Freeman, John Edgar Freeman (my Ggrandgather) are all listed as living on East Huron Street. Respectively, their addresses were 50, (for the McCormicks), and 234 for all the Freemans. Cyrus McCormick was tight with Henry King, and his granddaughter would later marry John Edgar Freeman in 1916. (see John Edgar)

As another example to illustrate the strong inter-relationships amongst these banking families of Gurnee, Freeman, Armour, etc., the following is of interest:

Per the Washington Post, February 18, 1911 (the same year as above), Eugene Van Rensselaer Thayer Jr., Harvard 1904, was best man at the wedding of Reginald Boardman to Carrie Louise Munn, daughter of Mrs. Charles A. Munn of Washington, formerly of Chicago. He and Boardman later went to a dance at the home of Secretary of the Treasury Franklin MacVeagh.

Per the New York Times six years later September 14, 1917, article Thayer to Head Chase National –Barton Hepburn resigned as Chairman of the Board of Directors to become Chairman of the Advisory Board. Albert H. Wiggin replaced him as Chairman, and Eugene V.R. Thayer was elected President in place of Wiggin.

This is the same year Halstead Gurnee Freeman gets on the board of Chase Bank. (see Halstead).
Back to Charles Yoe –

In 1932, Charles Yoe Freemans’ then law firm, Wilson and McIlvaine, was appointed counsel for Commonwealth Edison Company of Chicago. During his life, he also served as a director of Western United Gas & Electric Co., Northern Utilities Company, A.B. Dick Company, Marshall Field & Co., and Continental Illinois National. He lived at 1450 N. Dearborn Ave., Chicago, Illinois. That area of Chicago was later referred to as TheGold Coast.

1450 N. Dearborn Ave., Chicago, Illinois

That’s quite a house!

In December 1939, Charles was elected chairman of Chicago Edison, and the Public Service Company of Northern Illinois (which he was also general counsel for).

Charles Y. was also a former trustee of the Newberry Library, the Museum of Science and Industry, a treasurer and trustee of King-Browaer House, and was a member of the American, Illinois and Chicago Bar Associations.

In 1933, his son Charles Yoe Freeman Jr. is listed in Princeton’s Bric-a-brac book as also attending Princeton, like his father did.

Featured in Life magazine January 1, 1952, Charles Y. Freeman is listed as one of the board of directors of Marshall Field Department store.

life magazine

Life description:

Party celebrating the first century of the Marshall Field Department store’s 100th birthday by having seven of the board of directors standing on a 20 foot cake, (L-R) Marshall Field III, Albert B. Dick Jr., Charles Y. Freeman, Board Chairman Hughston McBain, Stanley Field, Henry P. Isham and President James L. Palmer.

An enlargement (with some clarity loss unfortunately)

3 – John Edgar Freeman (II) – son of John Newton and Mary Helen Yoe Freeman was covered in the first My Family Tree.

Next Generation

John Edgar Freeman and Mary Ann Beach

John Edgar Freeman the 1st

The birth date and location of John Edgar Freeman is a little fuzzy. For example, The Rev. Dr. Murray, of Elizabeth, N. J. says, that he ” was born of highly respectable parents, in South Orange, Essex Co., New Jersey; but Mrs. Bosworth, an aunt of Mr. Freeman, states that he was born in the city of New York. However, per this website, his birth is listed definitively as December 27, 1809, in New York City.

John Edgar was the member of a secet society called the “Brotherhood“, which had some connection with the Princeton Theological Seminary. As one of the rules of this secret society, he was asked to submit a life history of sorts, which he did in a letter while at sea on his way to India, on mission. His letter starts:

My Very Dear And Beloved Brethren :I intended to have addressed you. before leaving my beloved friends and country, but fully occupied were my precious moments, and so unexpected my departure, tbat I was not able to find time to make a farewell visit to my friends, much less to write to the Brotherhood. By the reception of this you will see that you are not forgotten, and that I am desirous of complying with our invaluable rules; the more so, because I feel that such communications give interest to your meetings, afford cause of encouragement, and present subjects of prayer and meditation.

…My mother was removed by death when I was only ten months old. Hence I never had the care of a pious mother: nor was my affectionate father a child of God. At this age I was removed to Newark, and left to do as I pleased. My school hours were spent along the banks of the river, from the bosom of which I was twice rescued. As my father visited the South, I was my own man at the age of six or seven. We lived next door to a hotel, and I found sport in rolling back the balls of the nine-pin alley, and received as my reward a glass of liquor, which made me deadly sick and frightened my friends exceedingly. The idea fills me with horror and indignation now. On another occasion the chamber-maid of the inn, having a sweet tooth, and not being able to gratify it, persuaded me to permit her to put me into the bar-room through a small aperture, in order to get some loaf-sugar for her. I did so, and was rewarded with a part of the spoils. But conscience spoke even in that hour and every limb tremoled for fear of detection. The form of the room, the shelf, the situation of the bowl, and the whole scene is still visible to my mind.

At the age of eight or nine years I removed to live with my grandparents, at South Orange. N. J. They both were pious, but being aged, had but little influence over a man from town.

…At the age of fifteen, I was sent away and apprenticed to a trade. Little did I, my father, or friends know what we were doing. I soon found my companions to be adepts in crime and vice of all kinds. Of the three apprentices who were my associates, one has died an awful death, requesting that his tools might be buried with him in order that he might work his passage across the river Styx. Another is still [1838] an abandoned wretch and outcast from society. The third keeps a grog hotel. Of the three journeymen, all came to an untimely end.

Such, Brethren, were the companions of my youth ; and as I write, my whole frame trembles with fear, whilst recalling the brink of the precipice on which I then stood. While with these monsters I learned to sip at the bowl, and to shuffle cards, to mock at things sacred, and blaspheme the name of God.

…in March, 1829 I joined the First Presbyterian Church of Elizabethtown.

In the following December I made up my mind to study for the ministry.—purchased the last year of my time for $80, and immediately entered upon my course of study with Mr. John T. Halsey. I remained with him two years and eight months,—was three years in Nassau Hall, Princeton, N. J., and three years in our beloved Theological Seminary, at Princeton.”

After graduating at the Seminary, he was accepted by the Board of Foreign Missions, and was ordained in the Church of which he was a member, in August, 1838.

He then married to Miss Mary Ann Beach, the daughter of Isaac N. and Mary Beach. Mr. and Mrs. Freeman embarked at Philadelphia in the brig ” George Gardiner” on the 12th of October, for Calcutta. Mary Ann died on 8 August 1849, in India. She had already suffered 2 deaths of daughters born to them, and the 3rd was deaf and mute, and had to be sent away in the hands of strangers. After hearing of her daughter’s safe arrival in New York, Mary Ann died. Fanny Lucetta Freeman was born in 1844 approximately and in 1857 at an exhibition of the Deaf and Dumb, at the Rev. Dr. Adams’ Church several compositions by the pupils were read, and among them was one by Fanny Lucetta Freeman.

” My name is Fanny Lucetta Freeman.

” I was born in Allahabad, Northern India. I am thirteen years old. My father, the Rev. John E. Freeman, is a missionary at Mynpoorie; he is preaching to the heathen, who are in darkness, and worship idols. My mother died one year after I left India. I have no sisters, but only one brother, who is attending the boarding-school at Hackettstown, N. J.; he is younger than I; he can hear and speak.

I was born deaf and dumb. When I was five years old, I left my home, and went to Calcutta, where I was taken care of by Mrs. Scott, a kind lady; she had two little daughters, who were my playmates. We left Calcutta in a ship, and sailed to England. We were four months going to England. While I was in the ship, I played with Mrs. Scott’s daughters, and their two large dolls, in the cabin.

“During the voyage, Mrs. Scott was taken sick, and died ; her children and I wept for her. Her body was placed in a coffin, and the sailors buried her in the ocean. One of the passengers, a gentleman, pitied us, and took good care of us. We reached England, where we stayed a short time ; then we got into another ship, and sailed to America. My grandmother, who resided at Newark, N. J., adopted me. She is so kind to my wants ; I love her very much indeed.

“I was too young to leave my home, but the physicians told my parents that I had better come to America, for something might be done to restore my hearing ; but God made me deaf and dumb, and I am patient. I thank God very much for giving me kind friends, and many other blessings.

Before I came to this Institution, I never knew about God, or any other thing ; I was very ignorant, like the heathen ; now I understand clearly about God and Jesus Christ, who came into the world, and died on the cross to save sinners.

” Fanny L. Freeman.”

In 1850 John Edgar brought his son John Newton back to America and arrived on the 28th of April, 1850. He was having heart trouble, but he recovered, and married Elizabeth Vredenburgh on June 3, 1851 and then left back to India on July 10. He and his wife were shot and killed by order of Nana Sahib, June 13, 1857 at Cawnpore, India.

Some of my friends and family members shared an interest in researching our/my family tree and we often shared information back and forth. Some of our work has shown up here and there on the internet, but not really comprehensively.

I know that when I was last doing my own research on this that many people who were obviously quite passionate about their interests in genealogy, had big holes in their trees where my family lines should have been. The research they had done though, was of great help to myself and others and I thought it would be fun to return the favor. Instead of starting with the standard form (usually software generated) of family trees, I would like to do a more anecdotal form. I’ll also keep adding to this as I go along.

I’ll start with my mother, Barbara Ann Freeman, who was an identical twin.

circa 1960

Barbara was born on Lincoln’s Birthday, Tuesday the 12th of February 1946 in Oakland, California. She was the first to be born of the twins. She weighed 5 lbs, 12 oz. She and her twin sister were the firstborn of her parents John Edgar Freeman Jr. (nickname Jack) and Virginia Chapin Freeman.

In 1947 my mothers family moved to Santa Barbara, which is where she eventually met my father. She had 2 other sisters besides her twin, all still living.

Per a birth announcement in the Santa Barbara Newspress of 1949, they were living at 1530 De la Vina Street in Santa Barbara.

Shortly after, they moved into their newly built house in Hope Ranch, which was here (map).

Google maps thinks it’s 402, but I don’t think that number is right, but the house is.I remember it being very steep from the road, which the other half of this shot shows a bit:

A view from the back of Via Dichosa:

My grandparents had built a bomb shelter on the property:

Baby me! with my mom:

My mother attended San Marcus High School, graduated, and went on to nursing school at Foothill College where she obtained her nursing degree. She was a nurse for all her life and was an inspiration to her patients.

She met and married my father, Lee Robertson in 1962. My mother and father divorced in 1971, and she was married twice more, but I was her only child. My mother died on a Thursday in October of 1989 – she was only 43. Briefly, and to the point, she committed suicide, and one of the factors was my mother’s attempt to get help from the Church of Scientology at Santa Barbara, and being summarily (and brutally) refused as an “illegal pc”. I only found out about this after she died, in her diaries. There will be a separate post in memorium of my mother.

Next Generation

My mothers father John Edgar Freeman Jr., was born April 5, 1918, (I believe in Chicago) and he died on April 10, 1989 in Santa Maria, California.

Although, a Princeton Alumni publication from 1918 says that he was born April 6, 1918.

He was preceded in death by his wife, Virginia Chapin, who died 30 April 1985. Virginia Chapin was born 11 September, 1923 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (I will cover her separately)

Per a Washington Post notice, John Edgar Freeman JR married Virginia Chapin sometime after April 12, 1945. (the date of the notice). He is listed as Lieutenant Freeman in this notice. My daughter Charlene, who is a professional Dancer, looks a LOT like her great-grandmother.

John Edgar or “Jack” as he was called (to differentiate him from his father) was a banker for a living. His sister was Christina Freeman (Tibbals), deceased October 27, 2009.

Grandpa (circa 1960) Grandpa’s sister Christina

My grandfather, John E. Freeman, Jr., attended Princeton with his cousin David Forgan Freeman. John lettered in Track and Field. They both graduated in 1940. Per the Princeton University – Bric A Brac Yearbook of 1938, David Forgan Freeman is listed as living at 21 East 90th St., New York, N.Y. and John Edgar Freeman, Jr is listed at 185 Chestnut St., Winnetka, Illinois.

Grandpa’s cousin David

Next Generation

John Edgar Freeman Sr., was my great-grandfather, “Pops”, and his wife was Roxana Pomeroy Freeman.

I don’t have a birthdate, but I did find an obituary for my great-grandfather. He died February 21, 1968.

The one great-grandchild mentioned was me!

Other than that, so far I don’t have much information at all about him. I did just find that he graduated from Princeton in 1907. (see his son’s birth announcement above).

John Edgar Freeman Sr., married Roxana Pomeroy February 26, 1916 in Chicago.

His wife Roxana Pomeroy, was the daughter of Silas Harris Pomeroy and his 1st wife, Christina King. They divorced, and Silas remarried to Georgia Starr. My great-grandparents had been living in Winnetka, Illinois and then they moved to my grand-parents home in Hope Ranch approximately 1952. Roxana died June 24, 1960. Roxana’s Grandfather was Henry W. King and her grandmother was Aurelia Roxana Case, of Chicago.

Roxana is on the right of the 3 girls in White.

A young Roxana – 1908

Per the Chicago Tribune Archives, October 9, 1912, Roxana was presented to Society in November, 1912.

“Mrs. Bryan Lathrop will give a dinner-dance at her residence, 120 Bellevue place on the evening before Thanksgiving, in compliment to Miss Roxane Pomroy and Miss Margaret Bentley, both of whom are to be presented to Society. …Both the young women were graduated from the Nixon school in Florence, Italy last summer.”